Undocumented Sanity

After writing my previous posts about my love/hate relationship with Nexus 1000v, I received a phone call from the Cisco Nexus 1000v Product Manager. I can only guess that he tracked me down because I posted a Bug ID in there. Regardless, he was very interested in making sure that my issues were resolved, and he pulled some resources together to help me out. I needed the help because my Secondary VSM had started into a reboot loop. Even deploying a fresh VSM would do the same thing after the Config Sync happened. While pulling some debugs off of the busted VSM, somehow 6 of our VEMs (Hosts) unregistered with the Primary VSM. My TAC Engineer was out of the office, but an Engineer from the 1000v Escalation Team got on the phone with me, and started digging around. What he found was this: a 3750 switch, home to several Development ESX Hosts, using a port-channel connected via vPC to our Nexus 7000 switches. The only traffic allowed across this port-channel was the Control/Packet/Managemen...

Continuing on with the hate part of my relationship, we recently ran into an issue where our Primary VSM died on us. It would boot up to this: Loader Loading stage 1.5. Loader loading, please wait... User Access Verification KCN1K login: admin Password: No directory, logging in with HOME=/ Cisco Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) Software TAC support: http://www.cisco.com/tac Copyright (c) 2002-2010, Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. The copyrights to certain works contained in this software are owned by other third parties and used and distributed under license. Certain components of this software are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.0 or the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 2.1. A copy of each such license is available at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php and http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.php System coming up. Please wait... Couldn't open shared segment for cli server System is not ready. Please retry when...

Over a year ago, we deployed Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switching into our VMware cluster. I love some of the features it offers, but the problems we have run across still haunt me. The first time I deployed into our environment, it was into a virtualized vCenter instance. We were running it on a separate SQL server VM in the cluster. This was all fine and dandy - until we had a major power outage that took the entire cluster offline. The problem with this scenario is that it leads to recursive and cascading failures if not carefully designed. Even if it is carefully designed, it can still make for an unpleasant scenario. Think this through with me. In the event of a complete power outage, what is the recovery process with a typical virtualized vCenter installation? I believe it looks something like this: 1) Power the hosts back up 2) Power up AD server (physical) 3) Locate and power up SQL server (unless this is on-box with vCenter) 4) Locate the vCenter VM and boot it up What about wi...