MicroNugget: What is Nexus-OS?

howdy partner there's a new operating system in town and it's called the nx-os or nexus operating system this is short for next generation all right I'm gonna stop talking like that because I'm annoying even myself hi everybody welcome to my micro nugget on the nx-os our operating system for the modern data center at least Cisco centric data center let's jump in what's so special about this next-generation operating system well if I were to sum it up in one word I would have to say it's modular yeah it is very very modular it's so modular that we can have a process like let's say we have a BGP process running as a module inside the operating system if that thing crashes it won't crash the underlying operating system and that particular process can gracefully restart and it will have all of the state information that it possessed prior to the crash this is because of a service called the persistent storage service or PSS that is running inside the nexus operating system so I guess we should say high availability is another key element with this next-generation operating system something else that's amazing about the nx-os now is that it is the unified operating system for both the land equipment of your data center and the sand equipment that's right in the old days it used to be the iOS that was running in the land and the sand had a SAN OS now these are unified thanks to nx-os 4.1 or higher once you get to 4.1 or higher of the nx-os it can run on both your MDS equipment and it can run on like your Nexus 7 thousands and five thousands that you're going to have in the land equipment so it's nice to have a single generation operating system that we can trust in the data center now in our CCNA data center and CCNP data center training classes here at CBT Nuggets we run you through the paces of this next generation operating system in this micro nugget I thought I'd just give you a glimpse and show you some really cool features and this is just a small slice of them but just enough I think to get you excited let's jump in roll up our sleeves and log in to the nx-os so here we are in a Nexus 7000 series now this is one of the switches that can do layer 3 routing and would be appropriate on the land side of your data center infrastructure notice that we have a pound sign after the name of my device ah this is very I Oh s based isn't it and for those of you and I'm sure it's most of my viewers today in this micro nugget for those of you that are familiar with the iOS you're going to feel right at home for instance we do a configure terminal and we can access global configuration mode in fact it's even easier than that you can just say config and you will enter global configuration mode so no longer the need to state the terminal by the way something else that I love about the Nexus operating system is the fact that like the pics or the adaptive security appliance operating system we can issue whatever particular show commands that we would want in any mode and we don't have to use the do command so if I want to do a show VLAN brief while I am sitting right here in global configuration mode that is not a problem whatsoever now let me show you something extremely cool have you ever met someone that was really really aggravated by a particular technology in other words they're very biased to one technology over another I'm sure you've met someone in your life who really loved AIG Rp and despised OSPF or maybe you met someone that loved OSPF and loves to poke fun at the eigrp crowd well in the nexus environment you can enable particular modules of the operating system based on your needs for instance if we despise a I gr P we can literally scrub it from our operating system by saying no feature a I gr P if we want AI gr P we can go ahead and issue the feature AI gr P command to enable it think about the power of this think about you saving on resources by only enabling those particular nx-os features that you desire think about this from a security perspective yeah if we eliminate a I gr P from the device we just eliminated what we would call that particular attack surface sure someone can't come in enable AIG R P and attack us using that particular facility something else that's really really cool about the nexus operating system is how they took care of role based administrative controls or are back we know this used to be a nightmare in the past right Cisco did all kinds of stuff to try and and give us role based features for instance we remember the old privet privilege levels easy for me to say huh the old privilege levels and you remember what a nightmare those were in the iOS so then cisco tried to improve this and they did what are called views and we could create particular administrative views in the operating system well they go a step further and in my opinion they really really improved this whole process in the NX OS operating system watch this I'll go ahead and create a go ahead and create a username so I'll say username John s I'll create a user account obviously and I'll say password Cisco 1-2-3 and then watch this role we can go ahead and issue the role keyword and we can go ahead and make this person a full-blown network admin or we can say you know what you're going to be a network operator this John Smith user account now has just a limited set of basically show commands that they can issue as a network operator they cannot make major configuration changes to the device notice we have a virtual device context administrator begging the question what in the world is a virtual device context well let me wrap up this particular micro nugget with a quick discussion of that one of the great things that we can do with something like the Nexus 7000 series device it's got such incredible horsepower it's got such incredible resources we can go in and we can create virtual nexus 7 KS inside of it so I could say this is a nexus 7 K a and I could go in and create a nexus 7 K be sure enough these will act as if they are independent Nexus 7000 s you can have your own admins in here you can have your own admins in this context you can be running BGP in here completely separate and distinct from the BGP that you are running in here you folks that are watching this particular micro nugget that are a bit long in the tooth right like me you're relatively old for this particular industry you'll remember back to the monolithic mainframes and you'll remember this was actually possible then we could take our mainframes and we could partition them into virtual systems we are certainly revisiting that with virtual device contexts in the nexus operating system well I certainly hope I've piqued your interest about the nx-os and again it receives very thorough coverage in CCNA data center and CCNP data center classes here at CBT Nuggets I hope this has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing

Channel: CBT Nuggets

Views: 81,465

Keywords: network monitoring, network monitoring software, netflow analyzer, network monitoring system, netflow analyzer free, network monitoring server, network monitoring tutorial, netflow analyzer installation guide, network monitoring basics, netflow analyzer tutorial, netflow analyzer linux, netflow analyzer configuration cisco router, network monitoring linux

Id: 5A4_ihYMn4o

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2013