Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Overview : - Fabric Extenders

Cisco Nexus® 2000 Series Fabric Extenders have transformed data center designs and enabled data
center architects to gain new design flexibility while simplifying cabling infrastructure and reducing management complexity. Cisco Nexus fabric extenders act like remote line card which which gives you design flexibility for your data center.

Fabric extender work with parent nexus switches i.e. N7K , N5K & Cisco UCS. Fabric extender work as additional remote line card for parent switches. All fabric extenders connected to parent switches can be configured from parent itself. Logically it act as one device or you can say as chassis device.

To setup these fabric extender & configuration is very easy, below is the configuration for fabric extenders :-


Nexus(config)# feature fex
Nexus(config)# interface e1/10 - 12 (Port Channel for HA)
Nexus(config-if-range)# channel-group 160
Nexus(config-if-range)# no shut
Nexus(config-if-range)# exit


Nexus(config)# interface po160
Nexus(config-if)# switchport mode fex-fabric
Nexus(config-if)# fex associate 160
Nexus(config-if)# no shut
Nexus(config-if)# exit


This is what you need to configure to make your fabric extender to work. Now you can see that you Fabric extender will come online & all fabric extender Ports will be mapped with your port-channel.

For Example : Here we had used Port-Channel 160, Now if you want to configure Fabric Extender ports then you need to configure " interface eth160/1/1"
160 is your port channel , 1/1 is your Fabric Extender port.

Show commands :

@ sh run fex
@ sh fex detail
@ sh int po160 fex-fabric
@ sh module fex
@ sh int status fex 160

Also you can connect this fabric extender to separate Nexus switch & create VPC's for HA. For that you need to config VPC's under port-channel & also you need to configure VPC's domain & peer link between both nexus switches. Below is test scenario for same :

                                     Nexus Fabric Ext
                                          =         =
                                        =              =
                                     =                     =
                                  =                           =
                                N5K-1 ==========  N5K-2
                                          vpc peer link

 

In this type of design is highly recommend because of redundancy. In next post i will come up with Virtual Port Channel known as VPC's.









 

Active Blog : Comeback

Hi Guys

From long time the blog was not active due to my work, but now onward the blog will be active & i will come up will all available technologies that is used in Service Provider , Enterprise Network & Data Center which include Routing & Switching , Security , MPLS , Load Balancer & Cisco Data Center 3.0.

I will come up with all major IT vendor i.e. Cisco, Juniper, Check Point, BigIP F5 etc.

As we know that the IT world is changing so rapidly that we can't stick to single vendor & technologies.
Now the Virtualization is the key component for IT Department because it reduce cost & increase productivity.
So the new name of Virtualization is "Cloud Computing".

Cisco is having very impressive product line for this Virtualization . ( For more detail check www.cisco.com for Cisco Data Center 3.0)

So Cisco came up with New Certification  CCIE Data Center or we can say it is enhance version of CCIE Storage.

So stick to this blog & get more detail on above technologies.

Chetan Kumar