The F5 Guru

Nexus 5000

I hope you got that Joker reference in the title…It is hard to concentrate when you have this sitting on your desk. The NX-OS based Nexus 5000/2000′s just arrived and I’m pretty excited to see the new things Cisco is implementing with their switch fabric. This unit has a 1Tb/sec back plane and has 10Gb ports like crazy. If I could get my hands on the Viprion we would really have a good lab to play with. I’m still editing and working on the 9.1-9.4 upgrade guide as well as installing a 10.x code base on one of my lab units, but I had to share this.  I am still baffled that it has a HDMI port for the “fabric extender” pictured on the 2000 (top unit) on far left. In order to get one of these bad boys you pretty much have to let this guy talk to your Cisco rep  (picture cracks me up too)

I just wanted to post up another quick example of how studying for the Cisco exam has come along way. Long ago you had to purchase expensive simulators with limited command sets for hundreds of dollars. Now you can simply fire up GNS3 running dynamips and emulate any IOS you want short of a 6000 series chassis

Here is a quick screenshot of a redistribution lab that I recently configured. 9 routers and a ASA firewall running on one VM, incredible!