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Cisco Nexus 2000 Series and Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Deployment Scenarios
The fabric extenders can be used in the following deployment scenarios:
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Rack servers with 100 Megabit Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, or 10 Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards
(NICs); the fabric extender can be physically located at the top of the rack and the Cisco Nexus 5000
Series switch can reside in the middle or at the end of the row, or the fabric extender and the Cisco Nexus
5000 Series switch can both reside at the end or middle of the row.
●
Mixed Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet environments in which rack servers are running at either
speeds in the same rack or in adjacent racks.
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10 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE deployments, using servers with converged network adapters (CNAs) for
unified fabric environments with the Cisco Nexus 2232PP.
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1/10 Gigabit Ethernet BASE-T server connectivity with ease of migration from 1 to 10GBASE-T and
effective reuse of structured cabling.
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Server racks with integrated lights-out (iLO) management, with 100 Megabit Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet
management and iLO interfaces.
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Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet blade servers with pass-through blades.
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Low-latency, high-performance computing environments.
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Virtualized access.
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Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders can single or dual-connect (using Enhanced vPC) to two
upstream Cisco Nexus 5500 platform switches (Figure 11).
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Servers or end host can connect to single or dual Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders using NIC
teaming (Figure 11) when the parent Cisco Nexus 5500 platform has Enhanced vPC enabled.
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Cisco Nexus 5500 platform switches do not support enhanced vPC. Hence, vPC is supported only between
Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders and Cisco Nexus 5500 platform switches or between servers
using NIC teaming and Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders. (Note: In the latter case, vPC is not
allowed between Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders and Cisco Nexus 5500 platform switches).
Figure 11. Deployment Scenario
