Cisco NX-OS is Highly Suited For Data Center Environments
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Cisco NX-OS for some of our cores at certain sites. We also use Cisco NX-OS at some of our data server environments. NX-OS addresses the high availability, high modularity, and high performance needs for these type of environments in our organization.
Pros
- Cisco NX-OS does a great job of supporting high dense environments due to Cisco NX-OS based devices having some of the fastest packet switching performance
- Cisco NX-OS supports high bandwidth environments really well due to the high throughput links that are typically found in Cisco NX-OS network appliances
- Cisco NX-OS provides some of the best redundancy in the way of "Active-Active redundancy" via it's VPC technology. This is especially desirable in data center environments.
Cons
- I would really love it for Cisco to unify the syntax of their operating systems. Most network engineers will be the most familiar with classic Cisco IOS based platforms since they are widely deployed at the access layer. Since Cisco NX-OS is less frequently deployed, the syntax change adds a steep learning curve to a lot of network engineers.
- Cisco NX-OS syntax, depending on the version, can be a bit counter intuitive. For example, most network engineers are familiar with the "interface range" command in Cisco IOS. In some versions of Cisco NX-OS, this command is omitted and instead you have to use something similar to "interface ethernet 1/1 - 4". Another good example, is the "show ip int vrf interfaces " command found in Cisco IOS. For some reason, in Cisco NX-OS, Cisco decided to change this to "show ip int brief vrf ". I wish Cisco would choose one universal version of the command on all platforms. More specifically, I wish Cisco NX-OS would use the same Cisco IOS command verbiage.
- Since Cisco NX-OS appliances will typically be deployed in more critical parts of your network, such as data centers, I wish that Cisco NX-OS had built in commit-check mechanisms before applying critical configuration changes. For example, in one of my previous jobs, I worked with a network engineer that was very familiar with Cisco IOS but relatively new to the Cisco NX-OS platform. They were staging a new network device and they were uplinking it to some of our Nexus switches. Something wasn't working for them and they decided they needed to tag the native vlan on a specific trunk interface on one of our Nexus switches. While in interface configuration mode, under that specific interface, they typed "vlan dot1q tag native". This is a global command which means it effectively tags the native vlan on EVERY trunk interface on the switch. Because they were applying this command in interface configuration command, they were under the impression they were applying to that specific interface only. This caused an outage which I then had to fix. It would be extremely helpful if Cisco added some type of commit-check that would inform the user that they are about to apply this change globally to every interface trunk or if they didnt permit this type of command to be executed in interface configuration mode and force the user to apply it in global config mode instead.
Return on Investment
- Cisco NX-OS has provided extremely high availability in our organization; especially when we've had to perform upgrades. We've been able to leverage their ISSU technology to perform system upgrades/downgrades with no downtime
- Cisco NX-OS has allowed us to leverage high throughput packet forwarding for all of our application needs. I can't remember the last time anyone has complained about slow application speeds in my environment.
Alternatives Considered
Juniper EX Series Switches and Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS)
Other Software Used
Cisco IOS
