The Extreme VDX series of switches (formerly Brocade VDX) was acquired by Extreme Networks in 2017 during the Broadcom acquisition of Brocade and the selling off of some of the company's assets. The products, including the latest ExtremeSwitching VDX 6740, are now discontinued.
The VDX is very well suited for any virtual environment; it is reliable along and easy to configure and maintain. It is great for inter-switch links on inter-cluster communication. I love our cluster configuration; allows for seamless, no downtime upgrades. It is actually fascinating to witness the upgrade; it takes about 10 minutes per chassis. This switch would not be well suited for intermediate distribution frame switching, it would be a waste of technology in an IDF!
It fits perfectly in all our data centers where we are using it. For small companies or smaller racks or something. I don't think it fits there because Cisco Nexus Series Switches is a big one. It's the most advanced one.
Maintenance, upgrades, and software certification can be performed without service interruptions because of the modular nature of NX-OS and features such as In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) and the capability for processes to restart dynamically
FabricPath:
Enables each device to build an overall view of the topology; this is similar to other link state routing protocols. Each device in the FabricPath topology is identified by a switch-id. The Layer 2 forwarding tables are built based on reachability to each switch-id, not by the MAC address. Eliminates spanning-tree to maximize network bandwidth and flexibility in topological configurations, as well as simplify operational support and configuration. This enables a tremendous amount of flexibility on the topology because you can now build FabricPath topologies for Layer 2-based networks the same as for Layer 3-based networks
Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV): Enables the Layer 2 extension between distributed data centers over any transport Layer 3 network
I had issues with the USB drive once and had a devil of a time resolving. We could use a little more documentation and a better manner in which to recover the drive. I do understand the issues every vendor faces regarding proprietary software. If you are a customer, it should never be an issue.
The VDX has been a champ in my environment, if I had issues I could probably come up with additional comments.
I am glad that Extreme VDX has continued the VDX product line because it really is a phenomenal piece of hardware that was very well made.
Implementing jumbo frames on interfaces of its fabric extender series (N2k, etc.) by editing the network QoS does not have to be a global configuration that would affect all its interfaces. It can be improved to become just an interface configuration.
Licensing on the NXOS is a bit complicated and expensive. I understand that the Nexus is made for core data center switching but it does not have to break the bank.
OTV technology is for Nexus only. Based on the advantage of the technology, it should be made vendor-neutral to accommodate other vendor devices.
overall a great product with high reliability . Nexus switches offer advanced features tailored for modern data centers. They support high-speed Ethernet (10G to 800G), scalable spine-leaf architectures, and unified fabric for LAN and SAN convergence. Nexus switches integrate with Cisco ACI for software-defined networking, enabling automated policy management and virtualization. Security features include microsegmentation, telemetry, and flow monitoring. They support programmability through NX-API, REST APIs, and scripting tools like Python and Ansible, making them ideal for DevOps environments. Nexus switches also offer low-latency performance for high-frequency trading and HPC workloads, and support Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for storage integration. With robust automation, telemetry, and cloud-readiness, they are widely used in enterprise, financial, and service provider networks for mission-critical operations.
These switches are very fast. They've been designed to work within the data center. We connect them to Cisco UCS-B Mini servers with the storage being directly attached. They are able to handle the data traffic pretty easily. We can also move servers pretty fast from data center to data center without overloading them. This has allowed our company to stay running during any kind of conditional outage. We have come to really rely on them for business continuity.
Overall, Cisco has great products and I believe that they believe in the philosophy of a great customer experience. Although there have been a few technical support issues that caused a lot of company anxiety, in most cases, Cisco has gone above and beyond in making a valiant effort to help the customer solve any issues.
I have not had an opportunity to use a similar featured platform in my networking journey. All I have learned is that Extreme VDX has great potential for controlling and managing networking operations in our company. The data analytics insights that we receive from data analysis have developed great planning and decision-making infrastructure. The speed of operation is always stable with high data transfer rate.
We made a simple overview of the market, Cisco is still a leader. vPC is a must know for any Cisco lover and any network engineer, actually is the most simple way to aggregate switches and provide high performance without going to a more complex solution and also we choose to keep standard solution of the market.
The Nexus 3000 series switches are data center switches, so I would say they have similar security ability to other switches in this segment. I don't have a lot of experience doing more than basic ACL security on switches, but I know these can be integrated into other security solutions like Cisco ISE and 802.1x authentication. It could also be integrated into an ACI solution to add micro segmentation, which would bring in other security functions.
