Network interface virtualization (NIV) is, in my opinion, a poorly understood technology that has a number of implications for network design and behavior. Here is some more information on NIV.

NPIV and NPV are both related to virtualizing some aspect of Fibre Channel N_Ports, but they are fundamentally different. This article provides some additional information on NPIV and NPV.

Here’s how to enable jumbo frames under both NX-OS 4.0 and NX-OS 4.1 on a Nexus 5000 series switch.

VMware, Cisco, and EMC made their official announcement of the VCE Coalition and the joint venture Acadia this morning. Acadia is interesting, but it really isn’t the meat of the announcement, in my opinion. The real substance of the matter is the nature of the coalition.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is receiving a great deal of attention in the media these days. Fortunately, setting up FCoE on a Nexus 5000 series switch from Cisco isn’t too terribly complicated, so don’t be too concerned about deploying FCoE in your datacenter (assuming it makes sense for your organization). Configuring FCoE basically consists of three major steps:

My last post about technology choices got derailed into a discussion about I/O virtualization technologies. So, I’m going to try again to get my point across about technology choices.

Every technology decision is a double-edged sword: vendors gain advantages and create disadvantages with their technology decisions. It’s important to evaluate technologies to discover both sides of the coin.

A question from a customer about NIC utilization and link aggregation prompted me to dig a bit deeper. Here’s some information I found on making sure you’re maximizing throughput on multiple links.

Much ado has been made—some of it by yours truly—about the current lack of ability to create a multi-hop Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) fabric. After digging in deeper with Cisco during my recent Unified Computing System (UCS) class, I have some additional information to share about the different forms of multi-hop FCoE and why multi-hop FCoE still isn’t available.

I mentioned yesterday on Twitter that I’d had something of a revelation with regard to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). This is probably nothing new to the experienced storage intelligentsia, but I’m just a simple guy so this was a big deal. After a spirited discussion in the Cisco UCS class about how to best leverage “FCoE-capable” storage, I have come to this realization: there is no such thing as an end-to-end FCoE solution.