Cisco Champion 2018

The Cisco Champions for 2018 are announced and I am proud an very honoured to be selected as a Cisco Champion for the 5th year in a row!
For more information about the Cisco Champion program, click here.
As another bonus this year, my colleague Rob Heygele is selected as Cisco Champion for the 4th year in a row! Congrats to him and offcourse to all other fellow Champions of 2018! See you soon at Cisco Live Barcelona and/or online!
 

Brand new Cisco UCS M5 C-Series

This is the second and last part of a small blog series about Cisco’s brand new UCS M5 series. In this blog: C-Series and GPUs.

Cisco UCS C220 M5 Rack Server


Record-breaking performance in a dense 1RU form factor for a wide range of workloads including virtualization, web, collaboration, cloud, and bare metal applications

What’s new

  • Support for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors
  • Support for 2666 MHz DDR4 DIMMS with new capacity point of 128GB
  • GPU support (max 1 per server) – post-FCS
  • Increased storage density – up to 10 SFF per 1RU
  • 10GbE Embedded LOM
  • Modular Internal FlexStorage Option: Mirrored SD Card or M.2 SATA @ FCS with SW RAID
  • New SSD and NVMe Options
  • Post FCS: 3D XPoint Memory, M.2 NVMe 

Cisco UCS C240 M5 Rack Server


Unrivaled performance for a wide range of enterprise workloads including big data analytics, collaboration, databases, virtualization, and high performance applications

What’s new

  • Support for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors
  • Support for 2666 MHz DDR4 DIMMS with new capacity point of 128GB
  • Hot-swap rear SFF drives with centralized RAID
  • 10GbE Embedded LOM
  • Modular Internal FlexStorage Option: Mirrored SD Card or M.2 SATA @ FCS with SW RAID
  • New SSD and NVMe Options
  • Post FCS: 3D XPoint Memory, M.2 NVMe 

Cisco UCS C480 M5 4S Rack Server

Designed for the most demanding server workloads such as in-memory database, EDA, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, and CPU / GPU rendering
  • Stand-alone or UCS-managed operations
  • Ultimate scale-up platform

New Drive Sleds for C-Series M5 Rack Servers

  • Smaller 2.5-in sled design enables better density (up to 10 drives) in the 1U server
  • Older M4 generation drive PIDs will not work with new M5 chassis
  • M5 blade servers will continue to use the older generation PIDs
  • 3.5-in sled will be redesigned to match the 2.5-inch brand identity

M4 – M5 comparison

GPUs

  • Manageability: UCS Manager and CIMC integration – Firmware, vBios, Service Profiles
  • Performance: Run at PCIe Gen 3 speed –Cisco + NVIDIA engineering collaboration fixed issues
  • Flexibility/Performance: Supported with all high-bin CPUs – significant mechanical/thermal work done by Cisco to overcome these limitations
  • Performance: Test up to 35c in Heat chambers with all max configs. Ensure no GPU throttling (requires fan algorithm integration and for some servers, custom baffling).


Brand new Cisco UCS M5 B-Series

Last week, Cisco announced the brand new Cisco M5 blades and services. In this post a brief summary about the technical details.

New Technologies and features

  • Support for the new Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and later, drop- in compatible follow-on processor
  • Support for 2666-MHz (and future faster) DDR4 memory and 3D XPoint DIMMs (when available from Intel CY18)
  • Support for additional PCIe NVMe storage offerings
  • Additional GPU support
  • Support for 1400 series VIC when available
  • Support for M.2 (“gum stick” form factor) bootable mirrored SATA drives (post-FCS PCIe NVMe)

What about M4??

There is a overlap between selling and supporting M4 and M5, this overlap is at least 12 months. End of Sale of UCS M4 is not before calender year 2023:

And now… Specs and pictures!

Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server

  • Support for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors
  • Support for 2666 MHz DDR4 DIMMS with new capacity point of 128GB
  • Up to 2 NVIDIA® P6 GPU
  • Modular Internal FlexStorage Option: Mirrored SD Card or M.2 SATA with SW RAID
  • New SSD and NVMe Options
  • Post FCS: 3D XPoint Memory, M.2 NVMe

Cisco B480 M5 4S Blade Server

  • Designed for a wide range of compute-intensive and memory-intensive enterprise workloads
    including virtualization and database applications
  • Balanced high performance platform with industry leading compute density, I/O bandwidth, and memory footprint

In the next blog post, everything new about the UCS M5 C series (rack servers) and GPU’s!
 

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MAC addresses in a VSS cluster

As you might know, creating a VSS on Cisco Catalyst 4500-X switches is pretty easy and there are many many guides with information how to do this. I think THIS guide is one of the best to do this.
However, there is one additional note which is not mentioned on that (and other) blogs if you are planning to use multiple Catalyst 4500-X VSS clusters. This is related to the switch MAC address.
By default, all MAC addresses used by the Catalyst 4500-X VSS cluster is automatically generated and is based on the VSS domain ID. But what does this mean?
If you’re planning to use multiple VSS clusters in the same network and in the same VLAN(s), you’ll end up with duplicate MAC addresses. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this is something you don’t want: it brakes a lot of things in your network.
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Cisco Firepower Chassis Manager Radius Configuration

There are many configuration guides on the Cisco website with details about configuring RADIUS and TACACS+ on a Cisco Firepower Chassis Manager. See this link for the configuration guide for 2.0(1).
In this document, you can read the following comment:

Remote User Role Policy Controls what happens when a user attempts to log in and the remote authentication provider does not supply a user role with the authentication information:

  • Assign Default Role—The user is allowed to log in with a read-only user role.
  • No-Login—The user is not allowed to log in to the system, even if the username and password are correct.

But… it’s very hard to find what attributes are needed to assign a user the administrator role.
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Cisco Nexus 9000 update 2016

This blog is about recent updates on the Cisco Nexus 9000 series datacenter switches. This describes my view on the switches and technologies.Nexus9k
Nexus 9000 series is currently Cisco’s flagship on datacenter networking. This is today and still for tomorrow.  Mounting the Nexus 9000 switches should be the last physical and configuration work you’ve done in the (future?) datacenter. All upcoming tasks (aka.. Configuring and provisioning the switches) should be done automatically by any automation tool. We have to move from our traditional networking tools to more automating and orchestration tools from today on. Nobody wants or has time to manually configure all these switches like in the old days.
The Nexus 9000 series switches are ready to achieve this with many on-the-box features like automation with PoAP, REST CALL with NXAPI and the “unix-way of management”. This, to program and configure the network / fabric.
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Cisco ISE 2.0 – Guest authentication ISE configuration

This is a 4 part blog series about configuring Cisco ISE 2.0 for WLAN authentication and WLAN Guest authentication (split into two parts) on a Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC).
ISEimageFor more guides about configuring (previous) Cisco ISE, see this page.This is part 4, the ISE configuration for guest access

Configure Cisco ISE

The Authorization profile will be created first, then the authentication and authorization policies are configured.
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Cisco ISE 2.0 – Guest Authentication

This is a 4 part blog series about configuring Cisco ISE 2.0 for WLAN authentication and WLAN Guest authentication (split into two parts) on a Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC).ISEimage
For more guides about configuring (previous) Cisco ISE, see this page.This is part 3, configuring the Cisco WLC for guest access.
Configure WLAN’s on WLC

  1. Navigate to WLAN’s, Create new

Picture12. Configure General Settings:
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Cisco Tetration Analytics introduction

Cisco introduced a new datacenter product yesterday (june 15 2016): Tetration Analytics.

Tetration1

Cisco Tetration Analytics. Monitoring everything, analyze in real time, actionable insights


Tetration Analytics is an solution to monitoring, analyzing and replaying datacenter traffic. If you’ve had a attack a few weeks ago and a fix is available now, the traffic of the attack can be replayed to verify if the fix is working (awesome!). A few slides to introduce the product:
Tetration2
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