[c-nsp] FHRP selection within Nexus

[Blake Pfankuch - Mailing List]

Howdy,
                I am going through the preliminary design and rough configuration migrating from legacy 6500's to our new Nexus 7000 core and am trying to alleviate existing design flaws through the infrastructure.  I did not build the original network, I have only been maintaining it for a short period of time.  Currently my L3 core has a large number of vlan interfaces.  There is no properly configured FHRP, just an equal split of defined gateways (vlan 1 through 2000 vlan interfaces live on 6500-01 and 2001 through 4000 live on 6500-02) and a failure of an HSRP deployment.  I have it narrowed down to 2 deployment options and I am hoping some of my educated peers might have some suggestions.  I also have some questions as it has been a while since I did this...

I am weighing options between HSRP and GLBP knowing that GLBP is Cisco only.  This environment will be Cisco only for the foreseeable future (always if I have my say).  The entire network infrastructure (meaning anything speaking a routing protocol or passing traffic) will be Cisco.

The devices holding L3 routing will be Nexus 7004 with redundant Sup2's and M2 10GBE line cards and running NX-OS 6.2 (2a).  My Cisco team stated that either were accepted solutions, but he did not favor one way or the other as he did not have reviews on GLBP deployments.  I am looking for someone who has deployed GLBP on 6.x and impressions on it.  Any issues or know bugs that have been hit related to GLBP?

One of our big initiatives for next year is redundancy and seamless failover.  With this in mind, we are in the process of implementing N+N redundancy splitting our datacenter North/South with a distributed edge load balancing implementation.  We are trying to decrease the traffic flow across north and south sides of that datacenter so I am favoring GLBP in my mind with some of the traffic distribution options.

With that in mind, would you as peers favor GLBP or HSRP?  I am looking at host dependent load balancing specifically to allow better traffic distribution cross sides of the datacenter, with times configured for 1 second hello and 4 second hold timers.

Thanks!
Blake