Hey guys... lets continue with our discussion about Cisco Nexus series. Today we will talk about Cisco Nexus 2000 Fabric extender and personally I am very impressed with this product. Have you ever imaged a linecard or I/O module operating out of the switch chassis or Chassis in rack1 and I/O in rack2 ???
You must be thinking I must have gone mad... but Cisco Nexus 2000 Fabric extender can make this possible for you. Now you wont have lay hundreds of cables to every rack in your datacenter. Cisco Nexus 2000 can be the End of Row switch to solve all your throughput and failover related issues.
okie.... Lets see How does Cisco Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender do this...
Before the introduction of the Cisco Nexus 2000 Series, a PoD(Point of Demarcation) included several Layer 2 ToR access switches or end-of-row (EoR) switches. Those switches were then redundantly attached to a tier of distribution switches implementing the Layer 2 and 3 boundary. The performance and scale of the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series along with the Nexus 2000 Series allows many more racks to be attached to a single pair of EoR switches. The efficient cabling of the ToR architecture is maintained by the introduction of the unmanaged Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders. short copper cables connect the servers to a ToR Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extender, and the fabric extender is itself linked using fiber to one of the access Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches. Twinax cables as well as fabric extender transceivers (FET; available as a bundle with the Cisco Nexus 2000 Series) are cost-effective alternatives to the Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) optics typically used to implement the horizontal cabling. From a management perspective, ports located on a Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extender appear to the user as if they were local to the upstream switch. Thus, in the virtual pod architecture, all the servers now appear to be directly connected to a Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switch.
And this this how your datacenter would look with Nexus 2000 -
So, if we summarize the entire discussion above. when we connect a Cisco Nexus 2000 fabric extender in a rack, It would start acting as a I/O of the parent switch. Which could be a Nexus 7000 or 5000 switch. This provides you single point of management and also free you from cabling hassles.
Isn't it great !!!
Lets have a look at Cisco Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender benefits -
• Full hardware redundancy
• Real In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU), with no packet loss for either Layer 2 or
Layer 3 traffic
• Segmentation with virtual device contexts (VDCs), a Payment Card Industry (PCI)
certified feature
• Port profiles, VLAN ACLs (VACLs), port ACLs (PACLs), and router ACLs (RACLs)
that can now be applied to the whole pod in one operation
• Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) Lite
• Up to 16,000 VLANs spread across four VDCs
• Large routing tables (FIB can hold up to 1 million entries), when connected to a
M-Series module
• Large MAC address tables and access control list (ACL) tables (128,000 entries
each), when connected to a M-Series module
• NetFlow (with 512,000 entries), when connected to a M-Series module
• FabricPath capabilities, when connected to a F2-Series module
Along with the above features, The management of the solution has been greatly simplified -
All ports in the PoD are now managed in a single location, with a single console and MIB access.
A software upgrade on the whole PoD can be achieved by installing a single image, with no traffic interruption.
The PoD still provides the Layer 2/Layer 3 boundary. However, Layer 2 connectivity between its edge ports is achieved without resorting to the use of the Spanning Tree Protocol, thus making the solution immune to the limitations and risks of this protocol.
Okie.. Guys I also found a video for you guys, but I am not very impressed with the quality of video but who knows you might like it -
This is more of product oriented rather than technology but still something is always better than nothing.
Alrite guys... With this lets wrap todays discussion here only
Want to know more about LISP - Read This
Cisco Nexus Overlay Transport Virtualization - Read This
Cisco Nexus FabricPath - Click Here
Cisco Nexus Fibre Channel over Ethernet - Read This