Today we did our first Hands-on-Lab. Last year these labs were fully booked so we decided to hit the lab early this year.

This lab was based around the Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch, which brings back network administration to network administrators.

Erik did the Cisco Nexus 1000v lab today. Since we didn’t receive any beta material yet this is our first real experience with the new virtual switch by Cisco.The switch is based on NX-OS so network administrators can use it just like they configure their other switches.

The session was well organized. It was a self paced guide that led you through the process of configuring your vSphere environment to connect to the network. You could let a script do all the network configuration for you or you could connect to the switch itself with an SSH client and do the configuration yourself.

Although some text from the guide didn’t match the lab itself the guide was easy to follow.

Since Erik had some experience it took him oh well, 2ms to shorten the (sometimes) long commands to the Cisco shortened versions, like sh int virt

He added a server to the Cisco Nexus 1000v distributed virtual switch and connected a VM to this distributed virtual switch. He also created a policy so that certain traffic was filtered out.

All in all it was an interesting glimpse into the future of networking on virtualized environments.

There are already a couple of articles on the Nexus 1000v. Check them out for more in-depth details.