Configuring Virtual Port Channel Using NDFC

Hello and welcome to virtual port channel video. In this video, you will learn how to configure virtual port channel using Nexus dashboard fabric controller. You will begin with configure VPC pairing between two switches and then add the VPC interfaces. So let's get it started. Your company is deploying a new data center using Nexus nine k switches. Nexus dashboard fabric controller will be used to provision the network infrastructure. To provide resiliency, faster conversions, and eliminate spanning tree blocked links, it's required to dual home your devices connected to the fabric with VPC technology. You as a network administrator has been tasked to use the Nexus dashboard fabric controller to provision the VPC config. You will configure VPC pairing between leaf switches, add VPC interfaces, recalculate and deploy config, and finally, verify the VPC configuration. You are now on the Nexus dashboard fabric controller interface. In this scenario, we already have a pre provisioned VXLAN fabric. It is required to dual home the layer two switch and that's why it is connected to leaf one and leaf two. You will start by configuring VPC pairing. This will create a VPC domain with peer links on your fabric switches. To do that, navigate to topology and then go to the fabric to land on this page. Right click the switches that is supposed to be members of the VPC pair, then select VPC pairing. The select VPC peer dialogue box comes up. It contains a list of potential peer switches. The fabric controller can detect which two switches can be paired together in case there are physical links between them and provide you with the recommended VPC peer device. Ensure the recommended column for the VPC peer switch is updated as true. You need to ensure that the switches are of the same row and connected to each other. Select the peer device then click on save. Once you are done with the VPC pairing, it's time to recalculate the configuration. This will help the NDFC to generate a new configuration that will be provisioned based on the changes you did. From the actions drop down menu, select recalculate config. The deploy config window will appear. Notice the leaves are out of sync, which means there is a pending config to be provisioned. You can click on the pending config to review what will be pushed to the switches. Notice a VPC domain will be created and a port channel is created for the peer links. Once you're done, click on close, then click on deploy to start the provisioning process. Once the provisioning is completed, click on close. Next, you want to add the VPC interfaces to the VPC domain. This is where you group the downlinks connected to the downstream devices. To do that, while you are under the topology tab, from the actions drop down menu, select detailed view to go to the fabric settings. To configure interfaces, navigate to the interfaces tab. From the actions drop down menu, select create interface. Select the type of the interface that you want. In this case, we are trying to create a virtual port channel. Select the VPC pair devices that you want to create this interface on. In our case, it's leaf one and leaf two. Specify the VPC ID that will be configured on the interface. I'll leave this to the default, which is one. You can tweak the VPC policy to configure the interface to be, for example, as a trunk or as an access. I will leave it as a trunk host. Next, you will need to enter the port channel identifiers for peer one and peer two as per your needs. I'll leave this to the default which is one. You can enable config mirroring in case you are using the same interface numbers on peer one and peer two. In our case, it's Ethernet one four, so I will check this option. And finally, enter the interface names that will be a member of this VPC. And notice the same interface is mirrored to peer two due to the config mirroring option. Feel free to tweak the rest of the settings as per your requirements. Once you're done, click on save. Then click on deploy to start the provisioning process. Once again, you can observe with the config that will be provisioned. The NDFC is presenting you with the current configuration on the switch, the pending configuration that will be pushed, and the end result in the expected config. You can click on the pending config to take a sneak peek on the configuration that will be pushed. Notice that port channel one will be created and Ethernet one four will be a member of the port channel. Once you're done, close the pending config, then click on deploy for the provisioning to start. And finally, to verify the config is successfully pushed to the devices, you can log in to one of the VPC peer switches added to the fabric. You can issue the command show VPC peer keep alive and verify the status of the peer switch and make sure the peer is alive. You can also use the command show VPC brief to display information about the virtual port channel configured on the switch. You can observe the VPC domain ID, the peer link status, the keep alive message status, and whether the configuration consistency is successful. And you can also issue the comment show running config VPC to display the running configuration information for the virtual port channel. This concludes our Cisco technical education video on configuring virtual ported channel with NDFC. Thank you for watching.