Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

New Data Center – Where have I been?

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I thought I would post a few quick words on where I’ve been for the past 2 months (certainly not writing quality content for this blog).  The past 60 days have been very hectic as I’ve started down the final stretch of designing, building and lighting a new data center. Thankfully the team and I are no strangers to moving computer rooms or constructing new buildings so we’re keenly aware of all the technical details needed to be successful in such a large endeavor.

I have so many short stories to share but no time to share them… In any event I’m now getting up to speed with a lot of new equipment, specifically Cisco’s Nexus gear.

What equipment did we use?

  • Cisco Nexus 7010
  • Cisco Nexus 5010
  • Cisco Nexus 2148
  • Cisco Catalyst 3750E
  • Cisco Catalyst 2960G
  • Cisco ASA5520
  • Cisco ACE 4710
  • Cisco AS5300 (yes we still have some dial-up users/vendors)
  • Cisco 7301 Router
  • Cisco 2821 Router

What racks did we use for the network equipment?

  • Liebert Knurr Racks
  • Liebert MPH/MPX PDUs

What equipment did we use for the servers/blades?

  • HP Rack 10000 G2
  • HP Rack PDU (AF503A)
  • HP IP KVM Console (AF601A)
  • HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure
  • HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Interconnect
  • HP SAN 8Gb Interconnect
  • HP BL460c G6
  • HP BL490c G6
  • HP DL380 G6
  • HP DL360 G6

What are we using for storage?

  • IBM XIV System Storage (SAN) (w/4 1Gbps iSCSI replication ports)
  • IBM SAN80B-4 SAN Switch

Additional miscellaneous equipment;

  • MRV LX-4048T (terminal server)
  • Brother P-Touch PT-2100 / Brady ID PRO Plus label makers

As some of you might know we selected Cisco as the network electronics vendor and have implemented their Cisco Nexus 7010 switches as our core, followed by the Nexus 5010 switches as distribution to the Nexus 2148 (FEX) switches in a top of rack configuration. We also utilized Catalyst 2960G switches for our management/out-of-band network given that the Nexus 2148 only supports 1000BaseT, no 10Mbps or 100Mbps connectivity. Of course Cisco is in the process of releasing the Nexus 2248 which supports 100/1000Mbps connectivity to edge devices. We chose to utilize the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 in our VM enclosures and we’ll utilize the Cisco 3120X in our non-VM enclosures. We’ve also installed and configured the Nexus 1000V in coordination with our VMware vSphere 4 environment. We decided that the CEE/DCE/FCoE revolution wasn’t quite here yet, or perhaps we weren’t quite ready for it so we stayed with a traditional Fiber Channel infrastructure around two IBM (oem Brocade) 80 port 8Gbps SAN switches. For SAN replication we’ll be using multiple 1Gbps iSCSI ports over a 10GE WAN. We ended up with an IBM XIV so we’ll have to see if it can keep up with all the traffic that’s going to be thrown it’s way.

So there should certainly be no shortage of material to talk about with all this new equipment, however, I’m certainly going to be very busy the next six months.

Here are some pictures of the cage (under 800 sq ft) , if interested. You’ll notice the chair and the upgrade that we performed on it in the last two pictures.

Cheers!

Cisco and Nortel Interoperability Technical Configuration Guide

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Nortel has released another technical configuration guide geared towards interoperability between Cisco and Nortel equipment. The document covers a lot of information including EtherChannel to MLT interoperability, Spanning Tree interoperability, Nortel IP phones connecting to Cisco switches and Cisco IP phones connecting to Nortel switches.

It’s definitely well worth the time to review.

Cheers!

Which branch office VPN solution?

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I’m looking to replace the two aging Nortel 1700 VPN Routers (formerly Contivity). These VPN routers provide branch office tunnels to our remote offices, vendors and business affiliates. We utilize two VPN routers which are geographically  disperse and connected to different tier 1 Internet Service Providers. This allows us to provide high availability and redundancy when used in conjunction with OSPF routing.

I’ve essentially boiled my options down to two possible solutions (vendors);

juniper-srx240-s Juniper SRX 240

cisco-asa5550-s Cisco ASA 5550

So which do I choose and how to best evaluate the different products. The primary purpose of the device is to provide branch office IPSec tunnels. The product needs to support OSPF and it needs some limited support for Multicast over VPN.

This morning I was lucky enough to have one of our preferred vendors, who just happens to be a Juniper reseller, come on site and help setup 2 Juniper SRX 210 gateways for us to demo.  I’ve never worked with a Junos based product and while the web based GUI was fairly straightforward the CLI interface is going to take some time to get use to. It’s not like Cisco, or Nortel or Brocade, or Blade Technologies. Thankfully I did find a quick start guide that helped get my feet wet with Junos.

Once I’m done with the Juniper SRX I’ll need to turn my attention to the Cisco ASA (Tom you know what I’ll be calling for soon – demo time).

I’ll post a summary once I have some thoughts about the Juniper SRX. Anyone care to comment regarding either the Juniper SRX or the Cisco ASA as it pertains to branch office VPN tunnels? As a note I’m already migrating our Nortel VPN end-users to our Juniper SSL VPN Secure Access 4000 appliances.

Cheers!

LLDP with Cisco 3750

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ciscologoNortel has released a Technical Configuration Guide designed to assist technical users configuring Nortel IP Phones connected to Cisco switches. The document makes specific references to the Cisco 3750 switch but the commands will apply to any Cisco switch that supports that specific feature.

I applaud Nortel for for making these Technical Configuration Guides available to users. It helps to broaden Nortel’s product reach and it empowers Nortel users to understand the different configuration options. I’d like to see Nortel get these documents indexed by Google or even there own internal Knowledgebase search engine.

In short you can use LLDP (802.1ab) on a Cisco 3750  to configure the Voice VLAN much the same way as you might on a Nortel ERS5520 switch using ADAC/LLDP. For those Cisco shops that are using Nortel Succession for voice this should be a welcome capability.

As in the past I’m going to post the document on my website;

http://www.michaelfmcnamara.com/files/ClientsInteropCisco_L2_1.1.pdf

As I’ve commented in the past it’s quite possible that Nortel may object to my “copying” of these documents. The goal is to make them readily available to Nortel users and allow them to be indexed by Google. I believe there are now quite a few Nortel corporate folks and engineers reading this blog, please contact me if you have concerns about me posting these documents.

Cheers!

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