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Extreme Data Center (VOSS/VSP) study materials
Extreme Data Center (VOSS/VSP) study resources

Extreme Data Center (VOSS/VSP): Monitoring, Troubleshooting, and Operational Maintenance

Extreme Data Center (VOSS/VSP) · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

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Monitoring, Troubleshooting, and Operational Maintenance

These questions ask you to move from symptom to evidence quickly, using the right show command at the right layer.

A layered troubleshooting order

  1. Physical/link: show interfaces gigabitethernet 1/1 - link state, errors, duplex, speed.
  2. Fabric: show isis adjacencies, show isis interface, show isis spbm - adjacency up, correct B-VID, unique nickname.
  3. Service: show i-sid, show vlan, show fabric attach - is the I-SID mapped locally and learned remotely?
  4. Forwarding: show mac-address-table, show ip route, show ip arp - is the destination learned, and on which port?
  5. Control/host: show log, syslog, and ping/traceroute sourced from the switch.

Maintenance practice

  • save config after every change; keep a known-good copy of the configuration on a TFTP/SFTP server and a backup config file in the boot configuration.
  • Configure syslog hosts and SNMP before an incident, not during one.
  • Before a software upgrade, stage the image, verify the boot configuration and config backup, reboot in a window, then re-check fabric adjacencies and service bindings.
  • show tech collects a support bundle - useful, but heavy, so run it deliberately and record the timestamp.

Worked example

Users at site B cannot reach a server at site A over a Layer 2 VSN. On B, the access port is up and in VLAN 110 (show vlan). On B, show i-sid shows I-SID 10100 mapped locally to VLAN 110 but no remote binding; on A the mapping exists. show isis adjacencies on B shows one adjacency down toward the core, traced to a B-VID mismatch on that link. Reasoning: the local service configuration was correct at both ends, so the fault had to sit in the transport that advertises the I-SID - the fabric layer.

Traps

Starting with show tech instead of the layer that is broken; inspecting only one end of a service; forgetting that show config and show running-config differ; rebooting before capturing logs; and assuming a down adjacency is a cabling fault when it is usually a configuration mismatch (B-VID, MTU, or IS-IS/SPBM not enabled).