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In the last week I talked to two different customers about issues with their port-channels, vPCs, and Spanning-Tree Protocol. The first customer thought he had a STP issue between his N7Ks and his N5Ks, but he actually had vPC design issue. The second customer also had the same design issue,…

I use multiple VPN clients, depending on which customer I am supporting on which day. I regularly use the Cisco VPN Client, the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client, and the built-in Native Cisco VPN Support on my Mac (I'm currently running Snow Leopard version 10.6.8.) However, a recent customer project led…

I’d like to share some thoughts about Disaster Recover / Continuity of Operations (DR / COOP). This is triggered by the storm-related outages we just had in the MD/VA area, [...]

For those of you looking for the rest of the top 10 list, I'll get back to it in a little bit.  But first I want to share an interesting idea:

Cisco announced the UCS E-Series in January. I haven’t been paying close attention to that particular market niche, ran across something about it at Networkers, and checked it out. This [...]

I’d like to share some excitement about the Cisco vPath 2.0 technology, which seems to be key to simpler delivery of  automated (and non-automated) virtual services in the datacenter. There [...]

In the last blog I posted, I wrote about the Cisco CSR and its usefulness in the cloud — and deferred including some thoughts about Cloud and Latency, since that’s [...]

Within the Collaboration practice here at NetCraftsmen, we always emphasize proper planning as being a major key to the success we’ve had on various projects over the years.  CUCM upgrades [...]

At CiscoLive 2012, Cisco announced the Cloud Services Router (CSR), aka the Cloud CSR 1000v. Personally, I think I should just go ahead and confuse everyone by calling it the vASR. Or [...]

One of my consulting customers pointed something out to me that I hadn’t known. IP helper (now DHCP relay) works differently on the Nexus 7000 than on the 6500. The [...]

I’ve seen gradually increasing interest in Cisco’s FabricPath technology, so it seems time to talk about designing for FabricPath. I’m going to provide some opinions and overview, and then point [...]

“My bags are packed, I’m ready to go. I’m standing here ….” Nope, that is not me. Cisco Live starts tomorrow, and I’m not even finished making my final list. [...]