Should Have Gone With Cisco

Ok guys, sorry for the delay on this one… Between work and my personal life, I have been so busy!

At this point, we have a working vPC peer link between our Nexus boxes. Remember our vPC peer keep-alive link needs to be up as part of this (I think of it as the heartbeat link).

So now we need to connect the access switch to the Nexus 7000 boxes to take advantage of virtual port channels. Let’s take a look again at our diagram.

In this example, I’m using one of the newer 4948 TenGigabit switches. There are two TenGigabit ports on the 4948. I’m connecting one to “Nexus1″ and the other to “Nexus2″. This doesn’t have to be 10Gigabit, it could be any number of 1gig ports if you like. For example, you could connect 4 gig ports to Nexus1 and 4 gig ports to Nexus2. Remember, you can have up to 8 active ports in a port channel.

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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

Config Guide

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.

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