In UCS Director you get a number of context based options for day to day operations. An example of this is, either from end-user or admin view, the lifecycle management functions when browsing VM’s (Virtual>Compute>VMs); These are useful and the majority of common tasks exist. Have you however …

The main way of interacting with the APIC (controller element of Cisco ACI) is via its Rest API. In fact the out of the box web GUI is built on top of it. This makes automation and programming the controller much easier than our traditional methods of configuring individual elements and devices via …

One of the great features of UCS Director is its Rest API. This is key if you want to interact with it programmatically or integrate with other products (like Prime Service Catalog, which Cisco has done as part of the Cisco Enterprise Cloud Suite). The API’s use GET and POST methods over HTTP or …

As part of my day job I create demos and run demos for UCS Director (UCSD), but what is UCSD? Its focus is on providing IaaS type capabilities (I some times refer to this as a foundation for IaaS) for your data centre, helping you on the journey to provide an on-premises private cloud. The name can …

When writing python modules it is useful to ensure the help function in Python can add some value For exmaple if you go to the Python interperator and issue the help function on the module you will get usful output; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 …

I decided to get familiar with Python so thought I would start sharing my notes. I have done some scripting in the past to help me get things done quicker, eliminate doing the same task multiple times and to manipulate data, most of this was done using Perl (and a few years back when I was focused …

I thought the Wikipedia definition of JSON gave a good description so thought I would quote its introduction. The official pages that go into much more detail can be found at www.json.org. JSON or JavaScript Object Notation, is an open standard format that uses human-readable text to transmit data …

So what is a cloud and what does it mean to us networking people? The term cloud has been thrown around for a number of years now and im not sure people have the same definition (and its fast evolving), personally im not a massive fan of the term. According to NIST a number of service models exist; …

The Nexus 7000 and 5000 series switches take port-channel functionality to the next level by allowing Muli-Chassis port aggregation. It was introduced in version 4.1(4). Port-channels configured as vPC can only be used as L2 links and no dynamic routing protocol should be used across the link. vPCs …

The Nexus 7000 supports VDC. VDC allows the partitioning of a single physical device into multiple logical devices.The logical separation provides the following benefits; Admin and management separation Change and failure domain isolation from other VDC Address, VLAN, VRF and vPC isolation Each VDC …