When it comes to power supplies, same power supplies can be used in both the Nexus 7010 and 7018 switches.

Currently there are three power supplies for the Nexus 7000 switches, two that are AC powered and one that is DC powered.   There is a 6000 kW AC (N7K-AC-6.0KW), a 7500 kW AC (N7k-AC-7.5KW), and finally a 6000 kW DC (N7K-DC-6.0KW) power supply.

The Nexus 7000 Series Switches can be configured in four power redundancy modes as follows

1)      Combined

2)      Power Supply redundancy (N+1)

3)      Input Source redundancy ( grid redundancy)

4)      Power Supply and input source redundancy (full redundancy)

The Nexus 7000 Series Switches are sensitive to variations in voltage supplied by the AC power source. Over voltage, under voltage and spikes can erase data from the memory or cause components to fail. To protect against these kind problems it’s highly recommended to ground power cables.

Pictures of the power supplies are below with the 6000 kW on the left, the 7.5KW on the right and the DC powered one below.

To allocate physical interfaces to VDC from the config terminal mode type the VDC name and then allocate the physical interfaces as shown below by using the command “allocate interface”

N7000-ITKE01#configure t

N7000-ITKE01 (config)#vdc VDC-CORE1

N7000-ITKE01-DC-CORE1 (config-vdc)#allocate interface  Ethernet1/1

N7000-ITKE01-DC-CORE1 (config-vdc)#allocate interface  Ethernet1/2

N7000-ITKE01 -DC-CORE1 (config-vdc)#allocate interface  Ethernet1/3

Now let’s verify the Interface allocation to the VDC by using following command ” show vdc membership”

N7000-ITKE01-DC-CORE1# show vdc membership

vdc_id:2 vdc_name: DC-CORE1 interfaces:
        Ethernet1/1           Ethernet1/2           Ethernet1/3          
        Ethernet1/4           Ethernet1/5           Ethernet1/6          
        Ethernet1/7           Ethernet1/8           Ethernet1/9          
        Ethernet1/10          Ethernet1/11          Ethernet1/12         
        Ethernet1/13          Ethernet1/14          Ethernet1/15         
        Ethernet1/16          Ethernet1/17          Ethernet1/18         
        Ethernet1/19          Ethernet1/20          Ethernet1/21         
        Ethernet1/22          Ethernet1/23          Ethernet1/24         
        Ethernet1/25          Ethernet1/27          Ethernet1/29         
        Ethernet1/31         

N7000-ITKE01-DC-CORE1#

In addition to interfaces other physical resources such as IPv4 router memory, IPv6 router memory, port-channels, SPAN sessions can be allocated to individual VDC.

Configuring Virtual Device Contexts (VDC)   Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switch is as simple as just entering the VDC name, by following below mentioned steps we can create VDC named VDC-Admin

Step 1

Connect to Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switch using a console port.

Step 2

Create a VDC named DC-CORE1

N7000-ITKE01#configure t

N7000-ITKE01 (config)#vdc  DC-CORE1

Step 3

Verify the created VDC by using following commands “Show vdc” and “show vdc VDC-CORE1 detail” as demonstrated below.

N7000-ITKE01# sho vdc

vdc_id  vdc_name                          state               mac            
——  ——–                          —–               ———-     
1       VDC-Admin                         active              00:26:98:07:1c:c1
2       DC-CORE1                          active              00:26:98:07:1c:c2
3       DC-AGG1                           active              00:26:98:07:1c:c3

The show VDC command shows VDC id based on which VDC created first.BY default VDC id is assigned to the default VDC. In this case it is VDC-Admin.

VDC-Admin# sho vdc DC-CORE1 ?
  <CR>       
  >           Redirect it to a file
  >>          Redirect it to a file in append mode
  detail      Show detailed vdc information
  membership  Show vdc interface membership information
  resource    Show resource configuration for VDC
  |           Pipe command output to filter

In upcoming post I will show how to allocate physical interfaces to the newly created VDC.

The Virtual Device Contexts (VDC) is a new feature introduced in Cisco Nexus 7000 NX-OS, so does it happens to be the first Data Center Switch to provide Virtual Device Contexts (VDC) capabilities. The Virtual Device Contexts (VDC) allows a Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switch to be logically segmented into four different virtual switches (device contexts). The logical separation of single Nexus 7000 into multiple logical devices provides the following benefits:

• Administration and management separation
• Change and failure domain isolation from other VDSs
• Address, VLAN, VRP and vPC isolation.

When the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switch is first booted, all interfaces of all line cards in the modular switch platform are placed in the default VDC (VDC 1).  Up to four VDCs can be created including the default VDC, but an interface can only belong to one VDC.  Interfaces from different line cards can be placed in different VDCs.  Once an interface is placed into a VDC, the interface can no longer be managed in the default VDC context.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switch shares some components between VDC(s), which include the following:

• A single instance of the kernel which support all of the processes and VDCs.
• Supervisor Modules
• Fabric Modules
• Power Supplies
• Fan trays
• System fan trays
• CMP
• CoPP
• Hardware SPAN resources.