Tag Archives: Cisco - Page 2

Using putty instead of the default ssh from Cisco device manager

DCNM

How do I configure Cisco DCNM so Putty starts when I select to go to the command line of a switch?

right click on switch

If you right click on a switch in the overview section in DCNM, you can go to the command line of that switch, but how do you change the default CLI SSH into Putty (or another telnet / SSH capable tool)?

Read more »

How to add new members to an existing Cisco smart zone

Cisco MDS

DCNM is down. I love the tool, but the downside is that you forget how to use the CLI. I faced downtime of our DCNM appliance and was forced to use the CLI instead. No big deal actually, but I still want to post the commands to use when you need to add new hosts to existing zones.

First you might want to create a new device alias for the new hosts:

device-alias database
device-alias name server1 pwwn 20:11:00:15:b9:00:00:00
device-alias name server2 pwwn 20:11:00:15:b9:00:00:01
device-alias commit

And then you want to add the new aliases to the existing (smart) zone:

config
zone name NameOfZone vsan 123
member device-alias server1 init
member device-alias server2 init
zone commit vsan 123

You can commit the whole zoneset now by running:

zoneset activate name ZoneSetName vsan 123

That’s it! there’s not much to it, and can save you a lot of time as well!

Cisco MDS “fabric merge” and “switch add” prerequisites

Cisco MDS

Prerequisites when adding a new SAN switch to an existing SAN fabric

When using enhanced device aliases, make sure you enable this on the new switch as well:

device-alias mode enhanced
device-alias commit

You can verify if this is enabled on an existing switch by this command:

sh run | grep “device-alias mode”

Read more »

The EMC / Dell merger: my tears and thoughts

Dell EMC

It’s been a few weeks now since Mr Dell, Silver Lake and MSD Partners announced they want to take over EMC and with that become the world’s largest privately held IT company. For me I relived the whole HP / Compaq merger and at that time Compaq was my favorite company. My whole world collapsed. What was going to happen to the world I lived in? It was going to disappear! But luckily it did not. The best pieces of Compaq at the time, their servers, were simply rebranded and sold as HP Proliants and the Alpha CPU “suddenly” appeared as the Itanium from Intel. And everybody was happy. Well, sort of. At least the server department kept on delivering what they were famous for.

And now this happened

I never realized Michael Dell was even in a position to actually raise that kind of money. But with help from Silver Lake and MSD Partners he succeeded to raise sixty five Billion US Dollars! Just imagine! Oh, wouldn’t I like to get my hands on a small portion of that!! But that’s a whole other story. Forget the money, forget the stock exchange market: what will this mean for both companies and the people working there? As some of you know, I’m involved with both the EMC education department as well as the customer facing piece of EMC Support and I want to share my thoughts on the future of my current “Compaq” equivalent, aka “EMC”.

Read more »

Cisco Smart zoning – part II: examples

Smart zoning examples

In my smart zoning post from last February I already presented the way to get started with Cisco smart zoning. I initially planned to give a more detailed calculation on how much time you can save if you were using smart zoning compared to SIST zoning.

SAN fabric

I was talking to an EMC SAN instructor (Richard Butler) this week and after I did a little white-boarding and used my hands to picture how massive a traditional SIST zone environment would be, we agreed smart zoning is the way to go.

Read more »