Cisco 4500X and Cisco Nexus 5548UP with Cisco 2200 Fabric Extender - The design and setup

This is the documentation of the setup of the core and distribution switch which I might need to refer back for the next setup.

This design include 2 x Cisco 4500X (Core Switch) and 1 x Cisco Nexus 5548UP with 1 x Cisco Nexus 2200 Fabric Extender (Distribution). The design only cover the HA (High Availability) setup for the Core switch... why not Cisco Nexus? The Cisco Nexus is too expensive!!


Cisco 4500X Firmware Upgrade:
Firstly, I upgraded the firmware for the Cisco 4500X to 3.5.1E (minimum 3.4 is required for VSS - Virtual Switching System) and previously I am having issue for the 3.5.0 that will freeze one of the core switch randomly every few weeks.

*Do note that if you upgrade the switch remotely after you setup the VSS, you might encountered only 1 switch will reboot after you issue the reload command. One trick to solve the problem is issue "reload in 1" to reboot the core switch in 1 minute then issue "redundancy reload peer" to reboot the other unit first so this will prevent the reload command just to reboot one switch during the IOS upgrade and lost the connectivity. 

For the thumb drive I have which can be read by Cisco switches is Sandisk Cruzer. I tried Sony Microvault and Kingston DataTraveler without joy.


VSS Setup:
Next, configure the switch virtual domain ID and switch ID then configure the MEC (Multichassis Etherchannels). For this design I am using the physical ports T1/29-32 in order to have 40GB VSS throughput and also note that the Cisco 4500X default port mode is Layer 3 mode so we need to issue switchport to make it L2 before I can accept the switchport command.

Here for the switch 2 (switch ID and the port channel is different):

To verify the VSS after the switch reload (of course you need to connect both switches port 29-32 to each other) just issue the show switch virtual command:

Cisco Nexus 5548UP and Cisco Nexus 2200 FEX (Fabric Extender) Setup:
In this design, the Cisco Nexus 2200 FEX will connect to the Cisco Nexus 5548UP extended module (N55-M8P8FP) port 2/5-8. First, we need to enable the FEX feature on the Cisco Nexus 5548 then configure the FEX ID. Configure the port 2/5-8 to associate the FEX ID created above and also configure the switchport mode to fex-fabric.

To verify the FEX connection, run show inventory command to list all items and you will see the FEX module is listed there:

Now you can issue the show interface brief command to show all interfaces and you should be able to see the Ether100/1/1 listed at below:

Upgrade the Cisco Nexus Firmware:

The Cisco Nexus firmware upgrade is much different compare to the IOS switch. After copy the firmware we need to issue the install all kickstart bootflash:kickstart-firmware-ver system bootflash:system-firmware-ver to install the firmware:

*Before upgrading the firmware, you need to verify the MD5 hash key of the firmware to ensure it is intact with the publish version. You need to run show file bootflash:firmware-ver md5sum to show the MD5 checksum number instead of using verify IOS command.

Connect Cisco Nexus 5548 to Cisco 4500X:
For the Cisco Nexus 5548 and Cisco 4500X core switch connection, we used 4 physical connection with LACP aggregation. On the Cisco 4500X core switch, configure the port channel 10 and configure T1/1/1-2 for the LACP:

Here you go for the Nexus 5548 which used port channel 20: