Here is my current schedule for Networkers this year.  Subject to change of course.

Monday is CCIE Voice written day.  I take my test Monday afternoon around 4 or 5 I think.

I have a couple of sessions on monday but its going to depend on the test to be honest.

 

Monday: 

1:00 PM-3:00 PM   BRKSAN-2701  Fibre Channel Storage Area Network Design  

7:00 PM-9:00 PM   BRKGENPNL-1003  Panel: Ask the Expert: Unified Communications  

 

Tuesday:  

7:30 AM-9:30 AM   BRKVIR-2985  Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switch  

10:00 AM-11:30 AM GENKEY-5501  Welcome Address with John Chambers  

12:00 PM-2:00 PM  BRKDCT-2951  Deploying Nexus 7000 in Data Center Networks  

4:00 PM-6:00 PM    BRKRST-3471  Cisco NXOS Software – Architecture

 

Wednesday:  

8:00 AM-10:00 AM  BRKRST-2043  Advanced WAN Design: Network Virtualization  

10:30 AM-11:30 AM GENKEY-5564  Keynote with Padmasree Warrior  

12:00 PM-2:00 PM  BRKCOM-2988  Unified Computing – A Unified Data Center Infrastructure

4:00 PM-6:00 PM   BRKVVT-2784  Maximizing Cisco IP Phone benefits  

7:30 PM-11:30 PM  Customer Appreciation Event  

 

Thursday:  

8:00 AM-10:00 AM  BRKRST-3470  Cisco Nexus 7000 Switch Architecture  

10:30 AM-11:30 AM GENKEY-5565  Closing Guest Keynote: Guy Kawasaki  

12:00 PM-2:00 PM  BRKSAN-3921  Troubleshooting the Unified Fabric (FCoE)  

2:30 PM-4:30 PM   BRKCRT-1963  CCVP:Mobility Features in Cisco UCM version 6 and 7

So Cisco announced their new “EnergyWise” solution this week that really seems to have a lot of promise.  It makes a lot of sense if you ask me.  With all the Cisco switches out there and with all the PoE (power of ethernet) devices like Cisco VoIP phones and access points all which get their power from the switches I think this is a perfect fit for Cisco.  Cisco has been making a big push into the building security side of things as well these days all of which adds up to great potential for the EnergyWise product.

One of the demos Cisco has for EnergyWise is the idea that when an employee comes to work and scans their badge when entering the building (building security) the system is then able to power up the employees IP phone and maybe turn on the power to their computer and office lights.  The IP phone and computer are easy to accomplish, not far fetched at all.  The powering on and off the office lights I am not so sure about.  Assuming they partnered with the right people for building controls, and assuming offices were doing office level zones then yeah its possible but not likely. 

My own experience (very minor at that) with the building controls for lighting and what not has shown me over the years that most create zones that are much bigger than single offices.  This is probably due to the cost of the equipment to manage a large number of zones.  However there is still a lot of potential with EnergyWise as a whole.

There is an example on the EnergyWise blog which I find fascinating:

“ if a single enterprise with 5000 employees were to just switch off its IP phones and wireless access points when not needed, it would save 185 tons of greenhouse gas a year—the equivalent of the emissions from 67 homes.”

This side of EnergyWise alone has a lot of potential and I think will be adopted by many.  It would be great to power down all the IP phones every night.  Even if you dont do it for ‘Green’ reasons but just to extend the life of the phones.  I am curious about how it handles those one off situations where someone may come into the office late to work or something.  Have to look into that.

With their partnership with Verdiem and others I think they are taking the right approach with all of this.  Glad to see that this isn’t a Cisco only solution where it is either all them or nothing.  I look forward to seeing how this will all play out and can’t wait to get my hands on some of this.

To some I have been doing this job for a long time, about 15 years, to others I am just another young tech guy. No matter what I have always been fascinated with networking, and since the first time I got the privilege to help pull some cable for my mentor who was setting up a Cisco router I knew what I wanted to do in life. I wanted to be that guy, the one who got to work on what I felt was the ‘cool’ stuff like the Cisco routers. Well years later that is me now. I am one of the “Cisco Guys” at work, for a major communications company. If it has Cisco’s name on it then its my job to learn it, implement it, admin it and love it.

And I DO! So, why the rambling? Well its all because of a book I have fallen in love with. It’s called “Cisco Cookbook” and its done by only the top tech publisher “O’Reilly”. Its just a great resource no matter how knowledgeable you are about IOS. One thing I have always regretted was my lack of scripting knowledge. Simply never bothered with it or learned it and have always wished I had. This book has some great useable examples I think anyone would helpful. Don’t know what else to say about it, just love it and think its worth a read and having in your personal library.

I originally wrote this in Sept. 2006 and have decided to resurrect it from an old blog for my benefit only.

Begin Repost:

Just recently worked on a last minute project to utilize MS Network Load Balancing on a few servers. I was pulled in to handle the network side of it and wanted to comment on it to possibly help others out in the future.

By default MS Network Load Balancing (NLB) works out of the box if you will even with Cisco switches / routers by using Unicast. However it is not the best or recommended way of doing things, it is the simpliest though. The main reason for the concern with using Unicast is switch flooding, all ports will get the data regardless if they want it. Kinda defeats the primary point of switches right?

So your other option is to leverage Multicast. This is an option with MS NLB, but it poses a problem with many devices not handling it correctly. See the MS multicast is not true multicast. You don’t use Class D (multicast) address space for your IP addressing for one. MS simply adds a virtual (fake) multicast MAC address to the data packets. These things hit the Cisco router on the network and well the router is smart enough to know that you cant’ or not suppose to anyway have a Class A, B or C address with a multicast MAC. So it never adds or creates an ARP entry.

So that is the best and easiest for me to describe the root of the problem in laymens terms. Now how do you make it all work?

Ok, so you want to leverage NLB using multicast with Cisco routers and/or switches. First you can just go ahead and select the multicast option with MS NLB. Now you will want to get on your core router and add an arp entry. You need two things, the virtual MAC created in NLB and the IP address of the cluster.

Create your ARP entry as follows:

arp 10.10.10.10 5555.5555.5555 ARPA – obviously use your cluster IP and MAC

Thats it really, as long as you got the right router in the network and barring no other unrelated problems you should be good to go. You can test by pinging the group IP. You can also keep a ping running and try shutting down one of the servers in the cluster, your ping should continue with no problems.

Now, before you think thats everything I should warn you that you are still in the same boat using multicast as you were with unicast in regards to switch flooding. Since the switch you have your cluster servers plugged into does not have the group multicast mac in its mac-address-table it is simply flooding all ports with the data. Not good.

If you have a Cisco switch here is one way, to me the easiest, to fix this. From within MS NLB where you choose Unicast or Mulitcast you can also select IGMP support. Go ahead and select this. Now at this point you probably just broke your network connectivity again. Why? Because it appears (at least it happend to us) that when you select the IGMP support it changes the group MAC. So you again have no ARP entry for the cluster.

Also, possibly unrelated to the lost of connectivity but you will need and want to now configure the switch for IGMP snooping. When you select the IGMP support what happens is the hosts in the cluster will now start sending out IGMP join messages. The switch takes that info “if IGMP is enabled” and uses it to put those ports into a multicast group. So now your multicast traffic for the group multicast MAC will only be sent to members of the group.

On a CATOS switch that supports IGMP it’s pretty simple commands:

set igmp enable

set igmp querier enable 200 – substitute your vlan# for 200

Couple of things to note. First this is not going to work for everyone. You may have to upgrade your IOS or CATOS to support IGMP, you may be using IOS instead of CATOS which is what the above commands are for. You do not have to enable the igmp querier, I personally found it useful as I did not configure a multicast router.

Ok, so you have multicast enabled with IGMP support. You added the ARP entry on the core router for the multicast MAC. You can ping the cluster. You enabled IGMP on the switch. Now lets see if the switch ports the servers are connected to now show up in a multicast group on the switch.

sh multicast group

Results (should look something like this):

Console> (enable) sho multicast group

VLAN Dest MAC/Route Des Destination Ports or VCs / [Protocol Type]

—- —————— ————————————————

200 01-00-5e-05-06-07 2/1,2/3-4

Well good luck, hope you find it some what helpful. Its pretty easy and the whole network load balancing stuff is pretty cool. If you need any help feel free to contact me.

Useful and related links:

Multicast Does Not Work in the Same VLAN in Catalyst Switches:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps708/products_tech_note09186a008059a9df.shtml#solu2

Configuring IGMP Snooping:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps708/products_configuration_guide_chapter09186a00804356ac.html

Multicast in a Campus Network: CGMP and IGMP Snooping:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/22.html

:
http://cio.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/lan/cat5000/rel_4_3/config/multi.htm#xtocid237780