NX-OS 5.2(1) for the Nexus 7000

Rather quietly, at least I never heard anything, on July 29th, Cisco released NX-OS Version 5.2(1) for the Nexus 7000 platform. (and the world rejoiced) This long awaited revision brings many new features to the 7k, one of those being MPLS support. (I’ll break the bad news to you now, it requires an additional license, so does FCoE. There is also a new SAN Enterprise License) But I digress, as I am upgrading my new (yet to be put into production redundant pair of 7010s) core to 5.2(1), I wanted to go down the list of new features that I find interesting…

• LISP — This is a hot topic right now, the session at Cisco Live ’11 was jammed packet with engineers chomping at the bit. Unforunately there are caveots here as well.. LISP functionality requires the use of the N7K-M132XP-12 or the N7K-M132XP-12L. LISP also requires the Transport Services Package license (N7K-TRS1K9).
• MPLS — In addition to basic MPLS support including LDP, Cisco is also offering IPv4/6 L3 VPNs, MPLS-TE, MPLS QoS, OAM, Multicast VPNs, and VRF route leaking.
• FCoE — Cisco requires the use of the N7K-F132XP-15 here. I’m not a storage guy, so I wont pretend to understand the details, but they’re also supporting storage VDC, and shared interfaces
• New OTV Features! — New features here include support for adjacency servers (allowing you to deploy without multicast enabled networks), IPv6 Clients (neighbor discovery via IPv6), Site Hardening (prevents accidental misconfigurations)

Looks like I’ve got less than 2 minutes left, time to wrap up!!

n7000-s1-dk9.5.2.1.bin                     92%  142MB 124.5KB/s   01:41 ETA

Cisco has made a pretty serious leap forward with NX-OS, lets hope this continues in the future. For more information please see the NX-OS 5.2(1) release notes located at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/docs/switches/datacenter/sw/5_x/nx-os/release/notes/52_nx-os_release_note.html