I hope you are all packed and ready for Cisco Live – Las Vegas next week. In the Sin City we will demo our innovative products and solution architectures that will help simplify and accelerate your journey to private and hybrid clouds. The best way to quickly learn about our products and solutions is by seeing them “LIVE IN ACTION”. With more than 50-60 demos being showcased across different focus areas (e.g. Borderless networks, collaboration, data center etc.) in the Cisco Main Booth, I thought it would be helpful to highlight the data center specific demos.

Dedicated to Cisco Data Center products and solution architectures, we have total of 12 demo kiosks with different themes as listed below. Each of the kiosks will have one or more demos that will highlight Cisco’s unique offering in that focus area. All the kiosks will be staffed by Cisco experts to answer all your tough questions. I am very excited to be part of the show and would love the opportunity to meet you in person. I will be available at the data center demo kiosk 12 -- “Automate and Simplify Your Journey to Cloud”.

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Tags: Cisco, cisco live, FabricPath, FlexPod, LISP, nexus, OTV, SMT, UCS, Vblock, vdi, VM-FEX

What is VM-FEX? VM-FEX is the consolidation of the virtual switch and physical switch into a single management point.

This sounds funny to say, but it amazes me how many people still use standard VMware vSwitches.  In the enterprise there are just too many things that can be missed on standard vSwtiches and we need consistency. This consistency is obvious when port group names need to match identically or vMotion will fail. Last time I went through the VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage class we were working on the standard vSwitch configuration, which utilizes some interesting port group failover order setting which include overrides. So, I zipped through my sheet and was waiting for the instructor to ask for answers. After a few other students I spoke up and proceed to explain my complex but accurate vSwitch configuration.

You remember this diagram from class right??

And the override settings?

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Tags: Cisco UCSM, Cisco VIC, Cisco Virtual Interface Card, CiscoUCS, DVS, Nexus 1000v, palo, VM-FEX, VMware, vNIC, vSwitch