[c-nsp] Nexus 5548 Questions and experiences...

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Thu, 16 May 2013, Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List wrote:

> Within the next week I will be starting my first dive into Nexus.  I 
> have read the Cisco Press book for nexus, however its primarily focused 
> on 4.x not 5.x and 6.x.

I haven't run 6.x on my 5548s yet.  It's still pretty new, and I'm only 
doing Nexus-specific stuff (vPC, etc) in a handful of places, so there 
hasn't been a huge need to upgrade.  I'm also not doing any layer 3 stuff 
on them at this point.

> I am looking for some real world feedback, including some of the 
> gotchas people have found in existing deployments.  Really this will be 
> a small deployment, a single 5548 for now and a couple 2232TM-E and 
> 2224TP for fabric extenders.  What has been the experience using TwinAX 
> cables to uplink to servers?  Cisco Twinax cables working only or have 
> people been able to use HP/Sun/Dell provided cables with luck?  What's 
> the experience with the Nexus B22 blade chassis FEX?

No experience with the B22 or the Twinax cables.  At this point pretty 
much all of the 10G we feed from our boxes is over fiber, and not much of 
that goes to servers, but that will eventually change.  For NX-OS in 
general, if you're coming from the IOS world, some of the command syntax 
is just different enough to be a pain for you and/or your ops folks.

Also, the upgrade process is slightly different.  You need to lead two 
(possibly more) images - the system and kickstart images.

The Nexus platform is essentially Linux under the hood.

> OS suggestions?  Again this is going to be a new deployment, and its 
> going into an environment that is not upgraded heavily.  As an example I 
> have moved some devices off 12.2 (20) or earlier in the past few weeks.

Unless you need a 6.x specific feature, I'd recommend sticking with the 
most recent 5.2 release.

jms