What is FCoE in Nexus?

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a computer network technology that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks. With the help of this FCoE can use the 10G ethernet channels.

How many vPC can be configured in Nexus switches?

In particular, each VDC for the Nexus 7000 Series switches requires its own vPC peer and keepalive links and cannot be shared among the VDCs. The maximum number of switches in a vPC domain is two. The maximum number of vPC peers per switch or VDC is one.

What is back to back vPC?

A back-to-back vPC is a way of connecting two pairs of Nexus switches with vPC. Depending on the documentation, it is also known as Multi-Layer vPC or Double-Sided vPC. When a device connects to a pair of switches, it will do so with a regular port channel or LAG. It is unaware that there is a vPC at the other end.

How does vPC work in Nexus?

Virtual Port Channel (VPC) ties two Nexus 7K or 5K switches together by doing a great job of spoofing Layer 2 (L2), including STP BPDU (Spanning Tree hellos) and FHRP (First Hop Routing Protocol — HSRP, VRRP, GLBP) behavior.

What is the difference between vPC and VSS?

2) In VSS there will be single control plane for both the switches, where as in vPC there will be separate control plane for every switch. 3) VSS can support L3 port-channels across multiple chassis,however, vpc is used for L2 port-channels only.

What is the difference between MLAG and vPC?

MLAG is a public protocol that is supported by almost every vendor using their own custom rolled implementation, while vPC is a Cisco Nexus specific protocol, not all the vendors have this technology.

What is double sided vPC?

In double-sided vPC, two access switches are connected to two aggregation switches whereas in single-sided vPC, one access switch is connected to two aggregation switches. Provides more bandwidth from the access to aggregation layer.

How does vPC avoid loop?

In vPC the loop is avoided at data plane rather than control plane. As per Cisco Design of vPC all data should be forwarded locally and peer-link should not be typically used for data packets.

Why do we need vPC in Nexus?

vPC (Virtual Port-Channel), also known as multichassis EtherChannel (MEC) is a feature on the Cisco Nexus switches that provides the ability to configure a Port-Channel across multiple switches (i.e. vPC peers). vPC is similar to Virtual Switch System (VSS) on the Catalyst 6500s.

What is the difference between port channel and vPC?

Here you can see that Virtual Port channel (vPC) is configured using the interfaces of two switches. One of the key difference between the two technologies (port-channel and virtual port-channel ) is that port channels support both Layer 2 and Layer 3. vPC on the other hand only supports Layer 2.

Is vPC active active?

In data plane terms, HSRP with vPC is active/active. Both of the switches forward traffic. Have a look at the MAC table. In a non-vPC deployment, the active HSRP router will have a G flag (Gateway) listed.

What is vPC in Nexus switch?

vPC (Virtual Port Channel) is the Cisco Proprietary feature that is only working on Cisco Nexus Components. vPC use to make Nexus devices logically single devices for the end host or devices. vPC is also known as Multi-chassis EtherChannel (MEC).

What is System priority in vPC?

System priority should be the same between the two vpc peer switches for vpc to come up. If you don’t configure it, it will default to 32667 and vpc will still come up in that case. In the LACP case we can have up to 16 Ethernet ports of the same type.

What happens when vPC peer-link fails?

vPC peer-link failure If peer-link fails, then all the member ports from vPC secondary node will be suspended. Here important to note, keep-alive is active in this scenario, which allowing nodes to exchange heartbeat.