Network Warrior, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18. Cisco Nexus

At the time of this writing, the Cisco Nexus product line is composed of four levels of devices: 7000, 5000, 2000, and 1000, though the 1000-level is usually a server appliance (1010) or a virtual switch (1000v). I will concentrate mostly on the hardware devices 7000–2000 in this chapter. As with most Cisco products, Nexus devices named with a larger number are larger and more powerful.

One of the selling points for the Nexus platform is something called unified fabric. Unified fabric provides the ability to combine traditional networking with storage networking in a single connector. This can be a pretty big deal, since we could have a pair of Nexus 7000s instead of a pair of Catalyst 6500s and a pair of MDS 9000 fabric switches in a data center. This chapter will focus on the networking aspect of Nexus switches, and will largely ignore storage. Though I’m sure there are companies out there eagerly pursuing this idea, in the few years that I’ve been working with Nexus, I’ve yet to see it in action. So far, I’ve built three large-scale data centers, and we worked with Cisco to understand FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), but we just couldn’t get buy-in from the executives.

Nexus switches use NX-OS as their operating system. NX-OS was designed from its roots in MDS storage devices, but looks and feels mostly like IOS. I say “mostly” because there are subtle differences that will baffle you as you learn it. This book is filled with such examples, ...