At the Cisco Live 2013 even in London this January, Cisco gave attendees a sneak peak of the about-to-be-announced Network Analysis Module (NAM) for, amazingly enough, the Nexus 7000 series switches. In fact, it is the first – and currently only – service module for the Nexus 7k.
So now that the NAM has been officially announced, I wanted to take a quick look at the product itself, and maybe look at what it may herald for the Nexus 7k lineup.
This week I have been kept busy attending a Webex-based online delivery of Cisco’s Data Center Network Infrastructure 2 (DCNI-2) course. This course is basically all about the Nexus 7000 and 5000 platforms, the operating system (NXOS) and all the fun you can have with it. It has also turned up a few interesting side discussions, some of which I’ll share in this post.
I thought it might be worthwhile though to talk a little bit about the delivery of the online course, the materials, the scope of the course, and whether or not it’s any good. I’ve not taken a five day Cisco course online before, so this is an interesting experiment for me.
Cisco Virtual Port Channels (vPC)
I was asked to explain Virtual Port Channels recently, and figured that I may as well share some thoughts about this useful technology as well as some potential pitfalls.
vPC solves problems that most people are likely to have in their network; STP recalculations and unused capacity in redundant layer 2 uplinks.