This past week, I configured our 2 Nexus 7000 boxes to take advantage of the new Virtual Portchannel (vPC) feature.
Here’s some info on this feature ::
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps9441/ps9402/white_paper_c11-516396.html
If you read my article about VSS technology, then the benefits with virtual portchannels are pretty much the same. One major difference is that the two Nexus boxes are still very much separate unlike using VSS. You still no longer need to worry about Spanning-tree. One thing that wont change from how you are probably doing things today is the HSRP configuration. You will still have your active and standby HSRP devices. The trick here is that when you dual home to the distribution, you use only one portchannel at the access side. Your access switch will dynamically load balance across both links using standard portchannel load balancing algorithms. The thing to remember is that packets received by the standby HSRP device are actually forwarded. So in a sense, you have a “active-active” HSRP state in the background.