CCNA DATA CENTER DCICN 200-150

the Nexus product line introduced virtual Port Channel (vPC). vPC enables two switches
to look like one, from

This new traffic trend is called “east to west,” which means the majority of the traffic and bandwidth being used is
actually between nodes within the data center,

Just to name a few benefits, a spine-leaf design scales horizontally through the addition of spine
switches which add availability and bandwidth, which a spanning tree network cannot do. Spineleaf also uses routing with
equal-cost multipathing to allow for all links to be active with higher
availability during link failures. With these characteristics, spine-leaf has become the de facto
architecture of network engineers and architects for their next wave of data center architectures
The Cisco Nexus product family is a key component of the Cisco unified data center architecture, which is the Unified
Fabric. The objective of the Unified Fabric is to build highly
available, highly secure network fabric

Modern data center designs need the following properties:

■ Effective use of available bandwidth in designs

■ Computing resources must be optimized

■ Using the concept of a service profile and booting from a SAN in the Cisco Unified
Computing system will reduce the time to instantiate new servers. This makes it easy to
build and tear down test and development environments.

■ Power and cooling are key problems in the data center today

■ The concept of hybrid clouds can benefit your organization. Hybrid clouds extend your
existing data center to public clouds as needed, with consistent network and security
policies. Cisco is helping customers utilize this concept using CliQr/Cisco CloudCenter.
■ Improved reliability during software updates, configuration changes, or adding components to the data center
environment, which should happen with minimum disruption.
■ Hosts, especially virtual hosts, must move without the need to change the topology or
require an address change.
The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series switches have a modular architecture that consists of the following:
■ Switch chassis
■ Supervisor engine
■ System controllers
■ Fabric modules
■ Line cards
■ Power supplies
■ Fan trays
■ Optics

Chassis
The Nexus 9500 chassis doesn’t have a midplane, as shown in Figure 1-9. Midplanes tend
to block airflow, which results in reduced cooling efficiency. Because there is no midplane
with a precise alignment mechanism, fabric cards and line cards align together
Supervisor Engine

The Nexus 9500 modular switch supports two redundant half-width supervisor engines

It is responsible for the control plane function.

System Controller

Nexus 9500 chassis has two redundant system controller

. They offload chassis management functions from the supervisor
modules.

The system controllers are responsible for managing power supplies and fan trays.
They host two main control and management paths—the Ethernet Out-of-Band Channel
(EOBC) and the Ethernet Protocol Channel (EPC)

The EOBC provides the intrasystem management communication across

modules, and the EPC channel handles the intrasystem data plane protocol communication

Fabric Modules
The platform supports up to six fabric modules. The packet lookup and forwarding functions involve both the line cards
and the fabric modules; both contain multiple network
forwarding engines (NFEs). The NFE is a Broadcom trident two ASIC (T2), and the T2 uses
24 40GE ports to guarantee the line rate. All fabric modules are active; each fabric module
consists of multiple NFEs,
Line Cards