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Cisco Live Follow Up And General Updates

July 5, 2012 / posted in ccnp, Certification, Cisco, Cisco Live US 2012, Datacenter, Misc, Personal / No Comments

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted here and I thought I would just post a quick update on what has been going on with me…

Cisco Live

As was stated in a previous post, I had the opportunity to finally attend  Cisco Live held in San Diego, CA this year.  The conference certainly lived up to the hype and was well worth the trip and time invested.  I think I was about half way into day 1 and I already had new ideas/knowledge that I wanted to lab up and bring home.  The logistics of running an event with 17k people has to be daunting but the staff at Cisco and the San Diego Convention Center did an amazing job in scheduling, herding, feeding and entertaining a rather large group of us geeky network folk.  As expected, the most valuable part of the conference was the personal networking that happened amongst the attendees.  I was able to meet and converse with many of the colorful networking voices that I follow on twitter as well as many others not necessarily associated with that group.

CCNP

One of the registration perks of cisco live is that you receive one free certification exam while at the conference.  I scheduled my CCNP Switch exam for Thursday afternoon just before the closing keynote.  When I had scheduled the exam I still had a month before the conference to study and figured I would have time in the evenings to cram some final concepts before taking the exam.  I couldn’t have been more wrong on both accounts.  We were in the final weeks of a datacenter closure at work which took entirely all of my time before the conference and then yeah…the parties.  Every night was fully occupied and I found myself on my way to the conference Thursday morning not having opened a book for the exam.  In my defense, switching has been my predominate focus in networking over the past few years so I had a good base of information but I was confident that there wasn’t any way I was going to pass the test.  I took about an hour before the exam to bone up on some of the concepts that I was unfamiliar with and then it was time…  I must have done something good (or clean living as a friend likes to put it) because I walked out not only with a pass but with a very respectable score on the exam.  With that out of the way I went off to watch Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage talk about all the cool stuff they do on Mythbusters.

Being completely overconfident, and ready for the next challenge, I scheduled my TSHOOT exam for the following week.  I figured that Tshoot would be a practical conglomeration of the previous two exams and was excited to see what the test looked like.  My thought process is that if I knew my stuff for Route and Switch that Tshoot should be a breeze.  I wasn’t completely wrong…  I thought Tshoot was the best of the three tests in the CCPN series as it gives real life scenarios in which you must use the knowledge you have to identify the device causing the issue, the technology involved in the issue and what command(s) are needed in order to rectify the problem.  It took a few minutes to get acclimated to the style of the exam (as it is not at all like the other Cisco exams) but once I was familiar with the process the whole exam just felt good.  I ended up acing this exam and successfully completing the CCNP process.

Work

As was briefly mentioned above, we have just completed a 6 month long project focused on closing out one of our primary US datacenters and migrating many of those services to other existing datacenters as well as building a new datacenter a little closer to home.  The project was technically challenging but was a success by every measurable metric.  It looks like more datacenter migrations might be in the future but for now I think all of us are enjoying not having the pressure of migrating business critical IT infrastructure and living in late night maintenance windows for weeks on end.  The next project on the horizon appears to be preparing for an expansion of our VDI platform as well as some general network related work that has been on the back burner while we have been focusing on bigger fish.

What’s Next

I think the most interesting thing on the horizon is that I’m contemplating an attempt at the CCIE Route/Switch certification.  I certainly am weighing all of the components as it is an incredible time commitment that not only would impact me but my family as well.  CCIE is certainly somewhere on the journey for me at some point but if I don’t pursue it now I probably will spend some time working towards non network related certifications…particularly looking at the VMWare’s VCP.

Well that certainly is more than enough blabbering on about myself… I’m hoping that with the completion of some of the time sinks I have been working on that I can start writing up some of the technical/commentary posts that I’ve had brewing in my head over the past few months.  If you’ve made it this far you’re a champ and thanks for reading!

Stacking Dell PowerConnect M8024-k 10Gb Switches

February 15, 2012 / posted in Blade, Datacenter, Dell, PowerConnect, Virtual / 1 Comment

Dell PowerConnect m8024-kI am currently building out a Dell m1000e blade chassis for a new datacenter build and ran across a problem that was far more difficult than necessary due to a lack of decent documentation.  One of the fabrics in the blade enclosure contains Dell M8024-k 10Gb/s PowerConnect switches.  These switches had a recent firmware release that enabled stacking functionality similar to what is capable with Cisco 3750 switches, but instead of using a special stacking cable, these switches will stack with any number of standard 10Gb/s ethernet connections.  This was ideal for our situation as the upstream equipment we are connecting to is a pair of Nexus 5548s and we were particularly interested in using vPC for the connectivity to the chassis.  After multiple failed attempts, and several conversations with Dell engineers, I have found the correct process for configuring these switches for stacking.

 

  1. Start with both switch blades out of the enclosure
  2. Insert the primary switch and connect to the console port for configuration
  3. Enter configuration mode
  4. Type the following command to enable stack mode:  console(config)#stack
  5. You should now see the following prompt:  console(config-stack)#
  6. Type the following commands for each port you want to use for stacking:  console(config-stack)#stack-port tengigabitethernet 1/0/19 stack (replacing 1/0/19 with the correct port number you are using to stack the switches)
  7. Restart the primary switch by issuing the reload command
  8. Once the primary switch has completely reloaded, insert the secondary switch and connect to the console port.  Do not connect the stacking cables at this point.
  9. Repeat steps 3-6 on the secondary switch
  10. Connect all stacking ports with appropriate 10Gb/s cabling
  11. Restart the secondary switch by issuing the reload command
  12. Go get a cup of coffee or stronger beverage if you have been at this for a while.  The secondary switch will renumber all of it’s interfaces as well as some other automated configuration changes.  This boot will take a while.  If you are connected to the console it will look as if the process has frozen…it has not.  In stacked mode you are only able to manage the single management point from the console of the primary switch.

 

That’s it…unfortunately the admin/config guide doesn’t state anything about the reloads that need to occur to make this happen or the order the commands need to be entered.  This process is in no way something that can be done online so if you are modifying a system that is production ensure that you have an appropriate maintenance window.