VXLAN EVPN ESI multi-homing on Nexus 9000

VXLAN EVPN ESI multi-homing on Nexus 9000

For years, multi-homing in VXLAN BGP/EVPN fabrics with Cisco Nexus switches meant one thing: vPC.  It works very well; two-switch redundancy, familiar operational model, no need to deeply understand EVPN’s native multi-homing details. At the same time, vPC has always carried operational overhead: peer-links, keepalive link, the potential peer-link bandwidth limitation, and the hard ceiling of two switches. With NX-OS 10.6(1), Cisco finally brings full native VXLAN EVPN ESI multi-homing on Nexus 9000!

This post digs into what that means and how it works.

Cisco GIR

Cisco NX-OS Graceful Insertion and Removal (GIR)

If you operate a data-center network with Cisco Nexus, you’ve probably already faced the problem of how to perform a maintenance on one of the two switches of a vPC pair, with minimum impact and risks for the production network. Cisco NX-OS contains a feature called “Graceful Insertion and Removal” or GIR to help you for that. Here is how it works.

Shutdown thousands access ports with Python and Netmiko

Shutdown thousands access ports with Python and Netmiko

When people ask me “what a network engineer should do to start in network automation?”, my first answer is: start with small things. Try to automate basic and repetitive tasks you do every day. Go after the low-hanging fruits first. Then, step by step, you can do more and more complex things. This is how I learn the best.
In the same vein, I want to share with you my recent experience of automating a very basic and repetitive task: shutdown thousands of unused network access ports.