Cisco Nexus datacenter workhorse
March 02, 2017
Cisco Nexus datacenter workhorse
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Nexus
We needed to take the step to [move to] 10Gigabit, and doing so on the Nexus platform is considerably cheaper then on the Catalyst 6500 platform. Furthermore we were looking into converged networks that were very suitable with the Nexus line of switches, which we later abandoned (not due to Nexus). Lastly the Nexus line of switches were built for the datacenter where we needed the 10G aggregation, and all the good features like lower latency, port-profiles, ISSU, FEX, etc.
- Nexus line of switches terms gives unprecedented price/performance numbers.
- Nexus line of switches makes deploying network changes easier due to port-profiles, commit/rollback, API, etc.
- Nexus line of switches brings great versatility, whether you want cheaper edge ports (FEX), low latency (all switches really, but especially a 3k line), a converged network with DCB support, etc.
- ISSU is not possible with servers using aggressive timers. This accounts for Windows Server 2012 for instance and can't be changed.
- Causing disruptive upgrades (can be minimised with VPC, but still drops).
- Same goes for Spanning-Tree, if you have any switches connected to the Nexus ISSU it's not possible without filtering BPDU or similar nonstandard changes.
- NX-OS has had a fairly high amount of critical bugs, the kind that makes the boxes crash and reboot.
- Higher scalabilty figures, the number of logical ports (VLANs pr.port * number of ports) are still quite low. If you allow all VLANs out all ports, you can only have around 100 VLANs, and quite a bit less pr.port if you use FEXes for scalability.
- We have had good ROI for the Nexus purchase. It has enabled us to give thousands of servers access to 10G which allows for higher numbers of VMs to be used on a single host/switch port, let backups finish in time, etc.