Cisco - 4

I’ve met Jeff last week in Oslo (Norway) where he was delivering a Cisco UCS training while I was teaching the VMware vSphere 5 Install, Configure and Manage course. During one of the dark Nordic evenings, we went out for dinner. We had some great hamburgers and I offered him a taste of my homemade sambal :-) The ice was broken and we had some pretty good laughs that evening.

Jeff works as a full-time Independent Instructor/Consultant that focuses on Cisco UCS and IP Telephony technologies as well as VMware virtualization solutions.  One of his biggest interests is the implementation of Unified Communications on the Cisco UCS solution using VMware’s vSphere datacenter suite.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/layer8man

He has started a weblog over at cloudinaround.com, in one of his most recent articles he introduces the first in a series of videos that will explore the Cisco UCS architecture and signal flow. In this first video, he starts by identifying the main components and their connectivity. In follow-on videos, he’ll dive deeper into how everything communicates.

This week I’m delivering a vSphere Trouble Shooting Training at Global Knowledge in Amsterdam. Just a few doors down the hall, Ron Heheman is delivering a Cisco UCS training. This morning I went spying in his classroom and discovered a real cool URL which leads to the Interactive Model of Unified Computing System. It’s based on Kaon’s realistic 3D interactive demonstration engine and can he found here.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V Switch delivers VN-Link services to virtual machines hosted on its server. It takes advantage of the VMware vSphere framework to offer tight integration between server and network environments, and to help ensure consistent, policy-based network capabilities to all servers in your data center.

Learn more about this software switch at the Nexus 1000V Switch Spring 2010 Seminar Series. The series has two tracks: Sales and Technical.

Topics include:

• Nexus 1000V Switch Business Impact and Return on Investment
• Basic Nexus 1000V Switch Features
• Accelerating Data Center Virtualization with Nexus 1000V Switch
• Advanced Nexus 1000V Switch Features
• Nexus 1000V Customer Panel
• Virtualize DMZ with Nexus 1000V Switch
• Analyst Panel Roundtable Discussion: Nexus 1000V Switch
• Approach Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance with Nexus 1000V Switch
• Ecosystem Partners & Products
• VN-Link and the Future of Virtual Networking
• Channel Partner Roundtable Discussion
• Interoperability with VMware Products
• Infrastructure as a Service Reference Architecture
• Cisco Nexus 1010 Virtual Services Appliance
• Advanced Networking in a Virtualized Environment

This is Jasjeet Singh's installation video of Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7.0 on VMware 1.0.1. This video is splitted into three parts.  

Part 1 – The setup

This week I’ve received a test model of the Cisco Catalyst 2960G-8TC-L from the nice people over at  Azlan, the Enterprise Division of Tech Data Corporation. The switch has 8 Ethernet 10/100/1000 ports, one of which is for dual-purpose, besides that it’s very compact in size with no fan. The 2960G-8TC-L is also fully compatible with the Catalyst series and has a LAN Based Image installed, the ideal switch for your home lab. I’m going to write a couple of articles about how to configure trunking between a Cisco Catalyst switch and a VMware distributed virtual switch.

First let’s start with the lab-setup, my home lab consists of two Asus barebones, both with 8 GB memory, some local 500 GB SATA disks and two Quad CPU Q9400 CPUs. For shared storage I’m using the Iomega StorCenter ix2 (Chad ;-)  I’m still waiting for the ix4). I’ve bought a couple of Intel PRO/1000 GT  single port network cards and have placed them in every free slot I could find in the barebones. This leaves me with 4 network cards per server, enough to setup a nice network test environment.

 

On my ESX server I’ve created a single standard virtual switch with two NICs which are connected to the Cisco switch. One Windows XP virtual machine with DHCP enabled. The VM is connected to the newly created Cisco VM Port Group. I’m going to use this virtual machine to do the initial configuration of the 2960.

Continue reading "Creating Ethernet VLANs on Catalyst Switches" »