Cisco

OK, so recently I had been setting up NSX in my lab and I wanted to create some static routes on my SG300-20 so I could access the VMs that were on my NSX network. I added the VLAN I wanted to use and added a VLAN interface. All good. I went ahead and added the static route as shown below. As you can see it was applied successfully. However looking at the static routes I could not see the route I had just added.

<img class=“alignright wp-image-5603 size-medium” src="/images/2015/02/cisco_SG300-20_1.png" alt=“Cisco SG300-20” width=“300” height=“180” of upgrading my lab switch, which is the excellent Cisco SG300-20, I’ve not had a chance to update the firmware since it was released 6 months ago because of the downtime. For some reason I prefer configuring the SG300 from the command line - a hangover from my old networking days I suppose, but somehow it doesn’t feel right to me to use the GUI!

No matter how good your network diagrams are, sometimes you need to verify the port your server/desktop is in. Cisco Discovery Protocol is a great tool for network admins when you need to quickly map routers and switches, and if you’ve got an ESX server connected you’ll see that it picks up CDP info too – but the vast majority of my managed systems are Windows. Here’s how to use TCPDUMP by Micro Olap to extend that functionality to your Windows boxes.

After some pretty heavy investment in terms of time and money, I’ve passed my ICND2 exam and am now qualified as a Cisco Certified Network Associate (anyone else find it odd that you’re not even considered a professional by Cisco at this level?!) I do consider the Cisco qualifications as significantly more valuable than the others that I hold, simply because of the difficulty of the exams. I do find them “honest” in that they’re not trick questions, and you don’t need a technique to pass – just in depth knowledge.

As is normally the case when I’m studying, I haven’t had time to post much on here lately. I’ve been studying to pass the ICND1 exam (snappily titled “Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices Part 1”) I’m really pleased to say that neglecting this site paid off, or rather the study did – I passed with a score of 930! It was a LOT harder than I had expected, I thought I’d walk out after 20m!

Here’s the setup. We have a core switch of 2 Cisco 3750s, connected together for fault tolerance as a single logical switch; we also have several ESX 3.5 hosts with 4 Gigabit Ethernet NICs installed each. The Virtual Machines will all be on VLAN 8 (reserved for internal servers) and the VMKernel will be on VLAN 107 (reserved for VMKernel traffic like VMotion). I want to create a load balanced, fault tolerant aggregate of these four NICs over the Core Switch.