Fresh from the lab, Jimmy Ray takes a question on OTV or Overlay Transport Virtualization. This layer 2 Data Center Interconnect technology is growing in popularity as deployed on the Nexus 7000 as it promises transparent workload mobility, business resilience and superior efficiency with computing resources. This could be THE technology for those of you overcomplicating your network design or simply not attempting certain architectures for you did not know this could be done.
We featured OTV quite awhile back in one of our earlier Fundamental animations. See if this also helps you. Read More »
Today, Cisco Live “World of Solutions ” (the show floor) opens at 4:30 pm PDT in San Diego Convention Center. One of the marquis demos has been shown at EMC World with a lot of interest.
This blog is the second part of a two part blog dedicated to this Mobility and Business Continuance demo, created by Cisco, EMC and VCE. In part 1 (read blog here) I invited EMC Colin Durocher (@OtherColin) to share with us his perspective on the demo. As promised, I come back today with more details on the demo, including a video interview conducted by Cisco Daniel Bogda (@dabogda) with EMC Craig Chapman (@VirtualChappy) and VCE Tom Chatham (@tchatham). I asked also Tom, who already wrote here, to bring his perspective on the demo.
Tom Chatham is a Principal vArchitect with VCE Corporate Engineering responsible for delivering VCE solutions, customer solution testing, technical marketing events and evangelizing private cloud. 16 years of experience in the industry, most of that time spent focused on storage, virtualization and unified computing. Including extensive network infrastructure, systems architecture and business continuity.
“VCE is excited to kick things off this week at CiscoLive! Between our big booth, speaking sessions, and demos we’ve got a ton to talk about (www.vce.com/events/cisco-live).
Like we did at EMC World, for this year’s CiscoLive! show VCE wanted to kick it up a notch with LIVE demonstrations of all the cool technologies we have at our fingertips.
Daniel Bogda, Craig Chapman, Tom Chatham
We have a number of VblockTM Systems going to Cisco Live! (and VMworld in August) so it made perfect sense to show off our Workload Mobility Solution. Besides, isn’t cloud all about the ability to offer services from anywhere?
We have three Vblock 300 systems located in the VCE, EMC and Cisco booths. An additional network aggregation rack has been added to each Vblock system to house Nexus 7010 switches, EMC RecoverPoint appliances and EMC VPLEX engines. Panduit provided 1000 feet of fiber trunk cable containing 6 pair of fiber, which has been hung from the ceiling between booths.
The Nexus 7010 switches are providing our core network services, making each booth it’s own data center. RecoverPoint and VMware Site Recovery Manager are handling traditional long haul disaster recovery. VPLEX Metro is providing Active-Active storage clustering capabilities. This is the ability to stretch a VMware vSphere cluster between two sites today, and up to four in the future. VPLEX Metro provides storage array block level LUN consistency and data availability while OTV on the Nexus 7000 series switches provide layer 2 network services.
Diagram: VCE Vblock WLM plan for CiscoLive!
Let’s take a step back for a moment and look at what makes this “cool”. Traditionally, migrating data and applications in or between data centers involves manual steps and data copies, where IT would either make physical backups or use data replication services to handle getting the data from side A to side B.
Well, Interop Las Vegas 2012 has come and gone, and it was another exciting week for us. The folks at TechWiseTV caught up with Prashant Gandhi, our Senior Director of Product Marketing for network virtualization technology, to talk all about the latest innovation in the Nexus 1000V portfolio and where we are heading with what is increasingly becoming a very strategic platform for Cisco. Prashant really hits this interview out of the park, as he ties the whole architecture and recent innovations together very well.
At Cisco Live London 2012, we announced that the Nexus 1000Vdistributed virtual switch (DVS) architecture will scale to support 10K+ ports across hundreds of servers. This is a multi-fold increase over our current support of 2K ports and 64 servers. What is driving the need to scale? Two reasons: More VMs and broader VM mobility.
The number of VMs is growing leaps and bounds in data centers and cloud computing environments, which in turn is driving the need to scale virtual switch ports. Depending on who you ask, we have already reached or are about to reach the tipping point where 50% of enterprise workloads have been virtualized. In most IT environments today, you get a VM by default for computing needs; to run an app on a bare metal physical server requires special approval. And needless to say, Moore’s Law continues to drive dense multi-core CPUs with extended memory architectures – thus enabling many more virtual machines to be instantiated on a single physical server. We have seen UCS customers deploy 10 – 30 VMs per server for production workloads, and 50+ (in some cases 100+) VMs per server for non-production workloads and virtual desktops. Increased adoption of public cloud computing resources, as well as growing deployments of private clouds in enterprises is also rapidly increasing the VM count. Also, customers often assign multiple vNICs per VM, e.g. a NIC for data traffic, another for management, a third for backup and so on. These factors are contributing to increased demand for virtual Ethernet (vEth) ports on the Nexus 1000V DVS. Read More »
