Nexus 7010 VDC

[spbench]

Received a post from a colleague involving Cisco Nexus VDC and which cards can be installed in the same context.  The colleague is attempting to install both 1G M1 and 10G F2e cards together in the same partition on a Cisco Nexus 7010.  He knows this can't be done with firmware level 6.1(2), but he thought there was information that stated this was possible with firmware level 6.2(2), but he is not sure even this firmware level will permit this.  If they cannot reside in the same partition, then he will need to acquire an additional license to create another VDC.  He came to me looking for advice, and I'm not fluent on this topic.  Can someone provide an answer to this question/situation?

Nick Venidis

nickv@us.ibm.com

[Steve Fuller]

Hi Nick,

Take a read of the VDC Changes in Cisco NX-OS Release 6.2 section of the release notes. According to the fourth bullet this is supported:

• A new VDC type, F2E, supports only F2e Series modules, but can be added to other VDC types to allow F2E to be part of the same VDC with F2 modules, or M1 or M2 Series modules. An F2e Series module and any M Series module can be configured in the same VDC.

I've not tried it but the way I read that is that from NX-OS 6.2 an F2E VDC can consist of mixed M1, M2 and F2E series I/O modules.

One caveat to the co-existence is noted in the section Behavior of Control Plane Packets on an F2e Series Module:

Behavior of Control Plane Packets on an F2e Series Module

To support the coexistence of an F2e Series module with an M Series module in the same VDC, the F2e Series module operates in a proxy mode so that all Layer 3 traffic is sent to an M Series module in the same VDC.

Regards

[spbench]

Steve,

Hi.  Thank you for the prompt reply.  My colleague and his team were able to get the VDC operational with the mixture of cards on the Nexus 7010 with the following configuration commands:

config t
vdc wbirn1-core
limit-resource module-type f2e m1xl     --> This set up the VDC to be able to allocate interfaces from both F2e and M1xl cards.
allocate interface ethernet 1/1-48
allocate interface ethernet 2/1-48
allocate interface ethernet 3/1-48
allocate interface ethernet 4/1-48

Now heI sees all interfaces in the 'show running-config' command.  Of course this was only possible after updating to firmware version 6.2(2).

Thanks for your assistance

Nick Venidis

nickv@us.ibm.com

[glen.grant]

  Thats correct , we ran into this a little while ago.  Version 6.2.2 and above  will support those cards in the same vdc.  We have seen strange behavior with hsrp vip and ospf so if you are running that you might want to think about going to 6.2.6 .

[eduardo.ramirez]

Hi Guys I have upgraded to 6.2.6 successfully as you know now we are able to create one more VDC type F2 so question is if there are some concerns or restrictions about use this new one like the other regular ones obviously with the appropriate I/O modules

Thanks