Today Imtech ICT announced that it is the first company in the Netherlands which has achieved the Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization from Cisco.

Cisco Data Center Architecture Specialization tests knowledge in selling, designing, installing, and supporting the Data Center Architecture. This specialization recognizes Data Strategy as having fulfilled the training requirements and program prerequisites to sell, design and deploy comprehensive Cisco Data Center solutions.

With achieving the Cisco Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization, Imtech ICT has shown that it has the required knowledge to design, supply, implement, maintain and manage the products from the Cisco Datacenter portfolio. It fits the Imtech ICT strategy to integrate various IT infrastructure domains (network, server and storage) into one integral solution. This solution is based on the FlexPod concept, a collaboration with Cisco, NetApp and VMware.

This enables Imtech ICT to support their customers with their issues regarding the data-center, virtualized infrastructures and private- and public- cloud services.

In the past, when I had to design a virtual infrastructure, I had a limited range of server hardware to pick from. Mainly HP and Dell or an occasional IBM server.

But since the beginning of this year I can not bypass Cisco. It is still a bit strange to some people when you mention Cisco with regards to server hardware but it’s a force we can’t ignore anymore.

When Cisco released their UCS server portfolio one and a half/two years ago, nobody thought they would storm the server market as they did. Certainly with their blade server solution they have a very appealing solution which can easily compete with HP, Dell and IBM blade solutions.

Personally I love to configure a Cisco UCS blade solution because it’s so freakin’ easy. One blade enclosure, one switch type, only two management entities and only seven different blade servers. This sounds a bit like a limited solution but trust me the possibilities are endless and performance is great.

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Cisco has been around for years and years on the networking and security side but since a year or so they are a real upcoming player on the server market. Personally I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems first hand and WOW I’m impressed.

On March 23, 2011 (1:00 PM – 2:00 PM GMT) and on March 30, 2011 (2:00 PM - 3:00 PM) Cisco organizes a UCS C-Series – Competitive Update Webinar for you to learn more about the Cisco rack mount server offering.

When you attend this Webinar you will learn about UCS C-Series value proposition and receive an overview and competitive portfolio comparisons. You will also receive guidance on UCS competitive pricing and architectural comparison. Specific areas of focus are management, stateless computing, optimized virtualization, and unified I/O all of which impact TCO.

When you are also interested in Cisco rack mount servers, you can register here.

During the last month I have been very busy building a new infrastructure at a client site. I’m responsible for the overall technical solution and the basis, a VMware vSphere infrastructure build on five Dell PowerEdge R805′s, Dell EqualLogic PS5000 and 6000 storage and Cisco switches for LAN, DMZ and IP storage networking.

Just before the customer initiated their functional test period we discovered that the overall Windows network  performance was slow. We did several test like copying an 8 GB file from local vmdk to local vmdk and VM to VM and found that the storage performance was no issue but the network performance was very slow.

In the last few years that I have been working with virtualization I have always been a fan of a static network configuration. Meaning, when I configure ESX networking I like my network interfaces and physical switch ports to be configured at 1000MB full duplex if the switch/network interface combination allows it. The idea is that if you purchase gigabit network interfaces and switches you know the maximum speeds. So you configure it to run at it’s maximum capacity, eliminating overhead and using as much bandwidth as possible purely for data transfer.

So when we experienced slow network performance I had a colleague check the Cisco LAN switches for errors, drops, packet loss or any other flaw which might indicate a speed or duplex mismatch. None were found so I assumed that the network configuration was not the issue. But as we know by now, ‘Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups!‘.

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When using a Cisco 3750 stack connected through stackwise technology you can add or remove a Cisco switch while the stack stays on. If you are adding or removing a switch from the stack, it is very important that the switch is turned OFF. The rest of the stack can keep doing its business.

For adding a switch to the stack follow these steps:

Step 1) On the new switch give the global command: switch stack-member-number provision type

Type is the type of switch you are adding to the stack.

When adding for example a third Cisco switch to the Cisco stack, use the following command:

switch 3 provision ws3750g-24t

Step 2) Power off the new stack member

Step 3) Connect the new member to the Cisco stack using the stacking cables, 1 loop at a time.

Step 4) Power on the new stack member. The switch will come alive and will receive the Cisco IOS version from the master, when that is completed it will be ready to service network requests.

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While I was updating the Determining VMware vCenter and ESX Build Numbers post I thought I would semi-automate the updating of the post with new build numbers for new releases, while working on it I started too fill an excel sheet and ended up with an excel sheet with the following products and build numbers for easy reference:

VMware vSphere 4 Suite (combines several products)
VMware Infrastructure 3 Suite (combines several products)
Cisco Nexus v1000 (1.0)
VMware ESXi (4.0, 3.5, 3.0)
VMware ESX  (4.0, 3.5, 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, 1.5, 1.0)
VMware Server (2.0, 1.0)
VMware vCenter Server (4.0, 2.5, 2.0)
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (4.0, 3.0)
VMware vCenter Lab Manager (4.0, 3.0, 2.5, 2.4)
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (4.0, 1.0)
VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat (5.5)
VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager (1.0)
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ (1.0)
VMware vCenter AppSpeed (1.0)
VMware vCenter Chargeback (1.0)
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The Cisco Nexus 1000V is the first switch that can be placed in your vSphere virtual infrastructure, giving back network control back to the people that know the most about networking: The network admins. The Nexus 1000V is built on the distributed vSwitch technology in vSphere and can be managed by the same tools that network admins already use for manging their physical switches.

Cisco is organizing a series of free seminars aimed at sales professionals as well as admins.

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Last night I received an e-mail from Cisco thanking me for my work in the Nexus 1000V beta program and announcing the availability of the final product.

For those of you that don’t know the Cisco Nexus 1000V, it is a pure software implementation of a Cisco Nexus switch which can be used in vSphere 4. It resides on a server and integrates with the hypervisor to deliver VN-Link virtual machine-aware network services.