NVIDIA Air Infrastructure Simulation Platform
I recently tested the NVIDIA Air Infrastructure Simulation Platform and would like to share my first experiences with you.
Posted inCareer Data-Center Learning & Certifications
Cisco Live 2024 Wrap-Up – Cisco Nexus HyperFabric, Disaggregated Scheduled Fabric (DSF) and SONiC
Last week, I attended my 11th Cisco Live in person, in the fabulous Las Vegas. This post is my Cisco Live 2024 Wrap-up.
I can already tell you that the next edition of Cisco Live US will be held June 8-12, 2025 in San Diego, California. If my company agrees to send me there, I’m already looking forward to it, because San Diego is a wonderful city.
Posted inCornerstone Content Data-Center
Migrating Cisco FabricPath and Classic Ethernet Environments to VXLAN BGP/EVPN over a 400Gb-based Clos Topology, part 1 – the why
During the past three years, I have spent a good portion of my time testing, planning, designing, and then migrating our DC network from Cisco FabricPath and Classic Ethernet environments to VXLAN BGP/EVPN. And simultaneously, from a hierarchical classic two-tier architecture to a more modern Clos 400Gb-based topology.
The migration is not yet 100% completed, but it is well underway. And I have gained significant experience on the subject, so I think it’s time to share my knowledge and experiments with our community.
SCP not working with MacOS 13 Ventura?
You have upgraded your MacOS to version 13 (Ventura) and a simple SCP to a network device does not work anymore?
In fact, this is normal, here is the reason and how to solve this problem.
Cisco DCAUTO exam study resources
I just passed the Cisco DevNet DCAUTO (300-635) exam (Yay!). This is my 3rd Cisco exam on network automation after NPDESI in 2018 (replaced now by the DevNet program), and DevNet CORE (DEVCOR) in 2020. But this time, I documented everything I read, so I could report it here and build a Cisco DCAUTO exam study resources. By doing this, I hope to help anyone who wants to study for this certification. And, as I have already passed the DevNet CORE exam, I am now Cisco certified DevNet Professional.
How to simulate a host in a real network?
Like some other posts, I didn’t think I would write this one because it seemed obvious. But, after talking to a lot of engineers and customers, I realized that not everyone knows this trick. So here it is.
The question is this: how to simulate a real host in a physical network environment when you don’t have computer at your disposal? Well, let’s take an example.
Posted inCornerstone Content Data-Center
RDMA over Converged Ethernet – RoCEv2 on Cisco Nexus 9300
On a previous post, I made an introduction about NVMe, NVMe-oF and RDMA for network engineers. In this post, I’m going to talk about RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and more specifically how to implement and configure the QoS part of RoCEv2 on the Cisco Nexus 9300 series.
Posted inCornerstone Content Data-Center
NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics and RDMA for network engineers
In the past, the evolution of network-based storage was not really a problem for network engineers: the network was fast and the spinning hard drives were slow. Natural network upgrades to 10Gb, 40Gb, and 100Gb Ethernet were more than sufficient to meet the networking needs of storage systems.
But now, with the introduction of ultra-fast solid-state disks (SSDs) and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), this is no longer true! Storage teams now have the ability to potentially saturate the network with incredibly fast devices.
Posted inData-Center Network automation
Automate file uploads to your Cisco Nexus switches
If you have more than three Cisco Nexus switches in nx-os mode, and you are not using Cisco DCNM or any other similar tool, you probably already have encountered this question: How to automate file uploads to your Cisco Nexus switches?
Here is a turnkey Python script using Netmiko’s SCP function to do this.
Posted inData-Center
Cisco NX-OS Graceful Insertion and Removal (GIR)
If you operate a data-center network with Cisco Nexus, you’ve probably already faced the problem of how to perform a maintenance on one of the two switches of a vPC pair, with minimum impact and risks for the production network. Cisco NX-OS contains a feature called “Graceful Insertion and Removal” or GIR to help you for that. Here is how it works.
Posted inCornerstone Content Data-Center
Cisco Nexus NX-OS tips and tricks
As you can see here, I have been using Cisco Nexus NX-OS for many years. And even more intensively since a few months, as I work for a data center now.
During all this time, I accumulated a nice collection of NX-OS tips and tricks. Here it is. I hope this can help you to improve your daily work.
Posted inData-Center Network automation
Shutdown thousands access ports with Python and Netmiko
When people ask me “what a network engineer should do to start in network automation?”, my first answer is: start with small things. Try to automate basic and repetitive tasks you do every day. Go after the low-hanging fruits first. Then, step by step, you can do more and more complex things. This is how I learn the best.
In the same vein, I want to share with you my recent experience of automating a very basic and repetitive task: shutdown thousands of unused network access ports.