Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

Cisco Live 2015. Yeah, there are things I can say about it that are negative. But even with all that, it was, for me, the best so far. Here’s my review and a few pictures …

Just a couple of notes for myself that Google didn’t make as clear as it should have for me.

Restating what I’ve pulled from other sources, and clarifying that there actually is a difference. It’s commonly said that “E2 routes will not include path cost,” but that’s an oversimplification of the difference and a somewhat misleading statement, because, in some cases, path cost is considered. Here’s the scoop.

$JOB doesn’t have as much of a testing environment as one might like to have, so sometimes you discover issues during implementation that, once you resolve them, you can’t go back and pick apart. An issue with the vPC Peer link appears to have prevented one of our 7710’s going into our data center from properly forming an OSPF adjacency with the DR.

I get an error message while pasting in some VLAN interfaces:

ERROR: Module 1, 2, 10 returned status: Tcam will be over used, please enable bank chaining and/or turn off atomic update.If bank-chaining is enabled on other modules and this is a new linecard insertion,please enable bank-chaining prior to reloading this module.

Well, this (I think) is what it means, and how I resolved the situation.

Having been silent about my Cisco Nexus 7700 work for a while, I come across something that irked me a little bit while trying to configure our 7700 pair to replace the 6500s, involving Virtual Port Channels. So here’s what Virtual Port Channels are and how they basically work, as well as one or two things that you might want to be aware of. So, this may end up getting quite long …

We ran into a little issue that, while others might think it simple, we had never seen before. A client requests a reserve lease; once the lease is provided, their PC wasn’t getting a gateway address. Here’s why (as far as I know at this time).

It is possible on the Nexus 7700 line, with certain optics, to break out 40Gb (and eventually 100Gb) to 4x10Gb interfaces (no one knows for sure what 100Gb will do – it will either be 8x10Gb or 10x10Gb). In this post I go over how $JOB is doing it (at least with the 40Gb) and what you need to be aware of. I do touch a little bit on the 100Gb breakout future and explain why we were looking to do it.

We racked our Nexus 7710 recently. Here’s some of the things you might need to know regarding getting this monster of a chassis into a rack.

I figured I should get this written while I can, and before it all fades away from my brain … here’s my thoughts on Cisco Live and some advice for future first-time attendees.