INTERNETWORK EXPERT .ORG

Folly: lack of good sense or normal prudence and foresight
Tolly Group: “Clients work with Tolly Group senior personnel to identify the chief marketing message desired”
HP: Client of Tolly Group with a desired marketing message of “Cisco UCS bandwidth sucks”, but in fact received an embarrassing Folly. (refund?)
By now you may have read or heard about [...]

Server virtualization has gained tremendous popularity and acceptance to a point now that customers are staring to host virtual machines from differing security zones on the same physical Host machine.  Physical servers that were self contained in their own DMZ network environment are now being migrated to a virtual machine resting on a single physical [...]

I had an interesting discussion with a customer the other day where both Cisco (myself included) and HP account teams where on the same call to discuss Flex-10, Nexus 1000V, or other approaches that may work better. — Yeah, awkward.
Anyway, for most of the time we (the Cisco team) focused on Flex-10’s total lack of [...]

I sometimes hear or read complaints about the Nexus 5000 + Nexus 2000 fabric extender architecture that I want to take a minute to address.  This should be short and sweet, a blogging concept that is foreign to me if you follow my work.
The typical complaints about this architecture from network engineers are [...]

My most recent post Simple Example of Network Interface Virtualization generated enough interest and curosity to warrant a follow-up post showing simple uses cases for NIV.
NIV takes a single physical adapter and presents multiple virtual adapters as if they were physical adapters to the server and network.  Now that the server and network see multiple [...]

I’m seeing some confusion in the blogosphere about how Cisco’s implementation of Network Interface Virtualization (NIV) really works so perhaps a very simple example is needed, and that is the intent of this post.  My previous posts about NIV with Cisco’s Palo adapter were focused on the big picture and the complete solution, such as [...]

This is a follow-up and enhancement of a previous design diagram in which I showed Cisco UCS running the standard VMware vSwitch.  In this post I am once again showing Cisco UCS utilizing the Cisco (Palo) virtualized adapter with an implementation of VMware vSphere 4.0, however in this design we are running ESXi and the [...]

This diagram is a sample design of Cisco UCS running vSphere 4.0 utilizing the VMWare vSwitch and Cisco’s virtualization mezzanine adapter.  The Cisco adapter is a dual port 10GE Converged Network Adapter supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Network Interface Virtualization (NIV).  The Cisco adapter is “virtual” in the sense that this single physical [...]

Egenera criticized Cisco’s math for UCS pricing in an article titled “A Closer Look at Cisco UCS pricing“.
After reading the first few paragraphs of this article it became quite clear that Egenera needs a closer look at their own math. Let’s examine the flaws in the article…
About the price of management software for a [...]

Here I am in my Cisco UCS training class and I just booted up my first blade. Im writing this post from the Cisco Unified Computing System!
Wow was this easy. Here is what I did:

Logged in to the Cisco UCS Manager GUI.
Created a “Service Profile” where I defined various configuration settings such as [...]