nx.os.and.cisco.nexus.switching.2nd.edition.1587143046

egular monthly basis as it could in years past. Downtime windows are becoming
shorter and further between. The next-generation infrastructure must provide high
availability through network design and product selection. The next-generation design
must also be incrementally deployable so that long maintenance windows are not
required to migrate services to the new design.
• Flexibility: Currently, Acme, Inc., has faced several challenges related to the capacity
of its data center; many of the regions are at full capacity with space and power
consumption at nearing 100 percent. Clustering applications require L2 adjacencies
that cannot be accomplished unless the servers physically reside in the same region of
the data center. In addition, recent efforts to optimize data center operations and lower
costs have resulted in large-scale server virtualization efforts. These virtualization
efforts have led to challenges associated with the L2 adjacency requirements of its
virtualization solution. Acme, Inc., would like the future design to provide the ability
to extend VLANs between regions of the data center and provide future abilities of
extending VLANs to its disaster recovery data center. Fibre Channel over Ethernet
(FCoE) is also something that Acme will be evaluating over the next several months,
and it would like the new solution to provide this functionality.
The Design
To accomplish the design goals, Acme, Inc., has chosen the Cisco Nexus lines of switches
because of the alignment that exists between Acme’s design goals and the Nexus product
family.
The existing Core Layer will remain intact because it currently meets all the Campus
connectivity requirements. New linecards will be installed to connect to the aggregation
switches at 10 Gbps.
The aggregation layer will receive the most dramatic change; the Catalyst 6500s will be
replaced with Nexus 7010 switches based on the current and future capacity demands of
Acme, Inc. vPC technology will be leveraged to enable an active/active topology and
eliminate any Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) blocked links.
The existing access switches will stay in place until they are fully depreciated and all of the
hosts have been migrated off of them. New access layer 5596UPs have been chosen to
provide next-generation server connectivity. Each region switch pair within the data center
will be replaced with a pair of Nexus 5596UPs and will aggregate Nexus 2248 and 2232
Fabric Extenders that are placed strategically in the top of various racks within the data
center.
Migration Plan
Acme’s business is such that it cannot afford extended outage windows for the migration to
occur and therefore has approved several smaller outage windows of approximately 1 hour
each. The IT management team would like to see the actual impact of the changes to be made
to be considerably less than 1 hour but are preparing for worst-case scenarios. There also
must be an easy back-out strategy with each change made to the environment to eliminate as
much risk as possible. This project has high visibility within the entire organization and