Cisco CLI Analyzer

I recently came across a great tool provided by Cisco. I hadn’t heard of it before, or seen it mentioned anywhere I frequent so I figured time to do a quick blog post. Cisco CLI Analyzer (or analyser for the rest of us English speakers) To start with, let’s link to the official page – … Read more

Home Lab Storage and Network Upgrade

I’m a huge advocate of home lab equipment – it’s one of the best ways to learn and grow as an IT engineer or whatever your job title names you. Having stuff you can intentionally break then try to fix or to test something so you are ten times more confident doing it for real … Read more

Cisco SG300 Default Route

I’ve been working on my home lab and finally have a few virtual machines running which will require Internet access (e.g Windows Server Update Services). My Cisco SG300 switch is setup for layer 3 mode and I have two VLANs currently configured on it with more to come as my lab environment grows. An important … Read more

Configure Cisco SG300 Switch Layer 3 Mode

The Cisco SG300 switch series can act as a standard layer 2 switch or be enabled for layer 3 functionality. Typically the switch will come in layer 2 mode (also called switch mode in the CLI). There are a couple of ways layer 3 functionality can be enabled and I will demonstrate them both below. … Read more

Cisco SG300-20 Switch First Look

Today I received my Cisco SG300-20 network switch – part of the new lab environment I am putting together at home. It’s a 20 port gigabit switch with layer 3 functionality. The unit itself looks very nice as you might expect from a Cisco switch and importantly for me is passively cooled so no noise! … Read more

VMware ESXi Host Long Reboot due to Fibre Channel Binding

I finally got round to looking at a problem which has existed in one of my datacenters for I guess a few years now. It’s really bothered me for a long time but I’ve just been tied up with other projects so it remained. I have two datacenters which are more or less identical in … Read more