Cisco Nexus VPC support (MC-LAG, others?)

For those not familiar, in the Cisco Nexus world, you can form a port-channel across two physically separate Nexus switches - they call this a “vPC”. Other vendors have similar multi-chassis LAG support (Juniper and HP both call it “MC-LAG”, Arista calls it “MLAG”, etc).

It would be wonderful to be able to see graphs that “combine” the two (or more!) ports from the separate chassis into a single view. I had a few thoughts on how this could be presented in the UI:

  1. Creating a “fake switch” entry populated with only the vPC/MLAG entries (not a huge fan of this route, but I can see how it might be the easiest to implement depending on how database / page structure works),

  2. preferably, just another set of interface graphs on both switches that show the vPCs (but ideally, those graphs don’t contribute to the “total throughput” graph for the switch itself)

On Nexus at least, you actually have to define a standard Port-Channel on both switches, and then add a vpc <number> stanza to both that has the same number (although the actual port-channel number doesn’t need to match, there’s a special place in hell reserved for people who don’t make their poX match their vpc X). In a vanilla dual-port vPC, there’s not a lot of benefit to having the “base” port-channel graph visible at all - I would actually prefer to not even see those graphs, and only see the “child” vPC graph instead (but have it represent the traffic from both members, combined).

It gets even more weird if you have a 4-port vPC, with 2 ports in use per Nexus. You then see a graph for a port-channel that’s showing aggregate bandwidth for the two ports… on the single switch you’re looking at. Easy to forget that there’s “another half” that isn’t being shown to you unless you go click over to the other Nexus.

I have nearly no coding skill, but I’m happy to dump any information needed from Nexuses (Nexii?) that would help, and if needed I can probably get you read access to my installation. I have a pair of Nexus 5548 as well as a pair of Nexus 93180YC-EX.

I would think that after the groundwork is laid for this, support for the similar feature from other vendors (Arista/Juniper/HP/etc) would not be too difficult to plumb in as well…