Cisco Nexus 1000V is a enhance virtual distributed virtual switch which integrate to the VMware vSphere 4. With Cisco Nexus 1000V, you will contain VSM and VEM, which VSM will be the virtual appliances that host the management of Nexus 1000V, and VEM will be installed on each ESX host that been connected to the Nexus 1000V.  I will not go in too details about Nexus 1000V in this post as my intention is to clear up the confusion on the VN-Link meant by Cisco.

6 months ago, this new term had come to my career while someone had claimed that the VN-Link will allow virtual machine to direct interact to the physical IO devices on the PCI-E without hypervisor in place. Well, this features had been included in VMware for quite some times in vSphere 4 by using the functionality call VMDirectPath I/O. But while doing this, you will lose the functionality of VMotion, and most users will not go for this due to the limitation on VMotion. Since this is new, no right or wrong, I decided to leave it for a while and further research to understand it.

After many round of discussion and reading on the blog and white paper, finally I have the answer I want now. VN-Link is the product name for a family of products, does not specifically refer to any one product so forget the idea of hardware vs. software implementation, etc.  Think of the Nexus family of switches: 1000v, 2000, 4000, 5000, 7000.  All different products solving different design goals but are components of the Data Center 3.0 portfolio from Cisco.  In VN-Link it contains Cisco Nexus 1000V, Hypervisor Bypass with Direct Path I/O, Pass Through Switching, Virtual Interface card & VNTag. If you had done the administration or implementation on Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000V, Nexus 5000 & 2000, you should familar with all these term that I mentioned here.

For more details information, I will recommend the Unified Computing Blog who had done the good explanation to described further in details for the VN-Link technology.

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Or you can view from here.

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Well, since we had achieved this in virtual environment, what about physical environment?

Most of the server vendor out there today, they are stateful, because the information require for the system such as UUID, Bios, Firmware, MAC, WWN ID are tie down to the physical hardware. There are others vendor able to virtualize the WWN and MAC address out there but still there are challenges to remain the UUID, Bios and firmware when they move the system state from 1 physical hardware to another. Now with Cisco Service profiles technology, we able to migrate our system state without changes, without reconfiguration and the entire process could be completed within 15 to 20 mins. All you need to do is to disassociate the service profile from the blade and apply the service profiles across another available blade. This is similar with the cold migrate features we are using in Virtualize environment. Of course, it does not provide online migration as vmotion does today. Therefore, now you can have vmotion on vmware provide online migration, cold migration for offline migration on virtual machine. With Cisco UCS Service Profile features, you will able to achieve the cold migration of the physical system within short down time. It meant a lot to the system administrator who manage the 24 x 7 operation.

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The new interface for the KVM also included the button to boot, reset and shutdown the server.

For the UCS web URL, you can also directly log in to the IP KVM and launch the specify Physical Server without logging into the UCS admin console. This will allow the users or administrator which do not require full admin access to the UCS Manager, to access the server console with an alternative method. To achieve this, it will recommend the IP KVM managment IP pools should be accessible from the LAN network.

With the new firmware release, I also found that the process to acssociate and disassociate the services profiles had been enhanced. The progress of the task execution are more accurate which can be easily view from the FSM tab for each of the item from the UCS Manager.

I also attached another few pictures that I previously setup for another project in Shanghai.

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Front view of the 2 UCS Chassis.

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There are video on the web which show you how to setup the Nexus 1000V in 8 mins video, which is greatly reliable. You can refer to the link here to find out more. Further that, you will no longer require to register and redeem the license as tough as previously does. Once you setup the Nexus 1000V, it will automatically come with the license applied which valid for 60 days, and you can enjoy your sweet time to wait for the final license key and re-apply it. Since the Nexus 1000V come with the http web base, I am not sure why Cisco had not consider to allow us to apply the license key file via the web rather than the messy process of transferring the license file into the nexus 1000v with certain CLI command. To simplify this, will definitely help the administrator to speed up the work.

There are 3 option of installing the VEM, which via VCLI, ESX console or VMware update manager. My setup today are without internet connection, therefore I went for both vcli and SSH protocol and I found that the easiest way are using vCLI. You can download the vCLI from here which is free via VMware official website. A lot of users are not adopting to Nexus 1000V today, but if you ask whether there are a need for it, my answer will be yes. For the users who had been virtualized their environment for years may realized the challenges been faced on the normal vswitch or dvswitch, and Nexus 1000V will greatly address all the challenges we have on the virtual environment.

We also tested the active standby architecture for Nexus 1000V in the VMware environment and it greatly fail over as it promised. Not too much hassle require to configure this, just as simple as 10 mins job follow the video here. Personally I will be glad to see more improvement from Cisco to further enhance and simplify the installation process and configuration which will greatly bring more value to the customer for planning and implementation moving forward.

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To enjoy the benefit of stateless computing, you must ensure that the server or system are boot from SAN. We simulated the blade failure during the demo, and we re-associated the service profile to any of the available blade within the UCS cluster, and power it on. The entire servers are back online which maintain all the necessary system state and no re-configuration was required include LAN, SAN, Hostname and etc. The entire process took less than 20 mins and the system was back online. We simulated few round with different blade but same images and profiles, and it work exactly as it promises. Stateless computing are the key features which meant for the IT administrator to minimize the system down time in the event of hardware failure & system compatibilities.

If you have a hardware failure on the current blade server, which the hardware will be replaced in the next 4 hours,  nothing much could be done on the system administration to resume the production system without stateless computing. With stateless computing in place, you can easily shutdown any of your test & Development systems, and transfer the service profiles to allow the production system back online in less than 20 mins. This will be helpful to improve the SLA and system uptime in the event of hardware failure.

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Beside unified storage, we are looking forward for unified computing system for the server compute platform too. Cisco had moved ahead of their competitor to bring this to the world and it is 1 fo the great platform that get attraction and adoption worldwide. Cisco UCS or Nexus 5000 both provide the unified I/O capabilities and allow us to transform the data center architecture today. Beside consolidating LAN and SAN into 1 with FCoE, the more interesting capabilities that get attention by us are the switching capacity.

The Nexus 5000 or UCS 6140 switches supported up to 1.14 Tbits/s and this number are more than enough to consolidate all the necessary traffic it need to be delivered by the LAN & SAN. If you have this solution in place today and well integrated with the unified storage as well as the core networking environment, you can easily choose to run NAS, ISCSI or FC through the same Unified frabics and Unified Storage you have. As everyone know, there are no perfect solution or protocol for every scenario, but now, you will able to choose the right protocol for every different computing system, application and database requirement without implementing separate ISCSI, NFS or FC physical infrastructure.

This is a nice picture to summarize the description about Unified Platform which I get it from http://viewyonder.com

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You can have a full view about the VCN alliance details from here.

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This picture show how the memory architecture been define in the Cisco memory architecture.

In this picture you can see that it present logically 32 GB which combine 4 x 8GB physical Ram with the Cisco UCS Extended memory technology.
With the expensive 8 GB memory module today, to have a server running with high memory capacity will not able to justify as part of the project business case. But with this technology in place, you will able to scale up to 192 GB per 2 CPU server by using 4 GB memory module. This will significant improve the consolidation ratio of the virtualization project and provide a better ROI for sure.

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• GUI setup following software install
• Layer 3 control between VSM and VEMs
• Virtual Service Domains for classifying and separating traffic for network services
• iSCSI Multipath—supporting multipath feature introduced in vSphere 4
• XML API for developing client apps for managing/monitoring the Nexus 1000V
• DHCP Snooping for validating DHCP messages and filtering invalid responses
• Dynamic ARP Inspection for validating ARP requests and responses
• IP Source Guard for filtering traffic on interfaces to valid MAC and IP addresses
• MAC Pinning for assigning Ethernet port members to particular port channel subgroup (where upstream switches do not support port channels)
• Static Pinning

There are more new features in the latest release and please read more from here.

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