Worth Reading: Xen on AWS Nitro NICs
If you find smart NICs interesting, you’ll like the latest blog post by James Hamilton explaining how AWS emulated Xen environment on Nitro hardware to keep old VM instances running on new hardware.
Infrastructure 3. Deploying High Performance Pure Virtual Linux Router – 6WIND
Hello my friend,
Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) is not a new topic. There are numerous blogpost and articles, even in our blog, which review this topic. Yet, there is much more we can cover. Today we’ll share some insights on one of the very interesting products existing on the market today: 6WIND vRouter Turbo Router. We have a limited amount of days to write a few articles under our evaluation license. Hence, we’ll focus only on the most critical elements.
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retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the
prior permission of the author.
Is Linux Suitable for Automation?
It absolutely is. In fact, Linux is the real home for automation systems, as in many cases it hosts the tools you create in Ansible, Python, Bash, Go or any other language. At the same time, in order to effectively work with Linux, you need to know how to automate management and operation of Linux operating system itself. And you will be absolutely capable to do that, once you attend our Continue reading
Circular Dependencies Considered Harmful
A while ago my friend Nicola Modena sent me another intriguing curveball:
Imagine a CTO who has invested millions in a super-secure data center and wants to consolidate all compute workloads. If you were asked to run a BGP Route Reflector as a VM in that environment, and would like to bring OSPF or ISIS to that box to enable BGP ORR, would you use a GRE tunnel to avoid a dedicated VLAN or boring other hosts with routing protocol hello messages?
While there might be good reasons for doing that, my first knee-jerk reaction was:
Infrastructure 2. Building Multi Server Cloud with Proxmox (Debian Linux) and Local Storage
Hello my friend,
In the previous blogpost we covered the installation of Proxmox as a core platform for building open source virtualisation environment. Today we’ll continue this discussion and will show how to create a multi server cloud in order to better spread the load and provide resiliency for your applications.
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retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the
prior permission of the author.
How to Automate Infrastructure?
In many cases, Linux is a major driving power behind modern clouds. In fact, if you look across all current big clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, you will see Linux everywhere: on servers and on network devices (e.g., data centre switches). Therefore, knowledge how to deal with Linux and how to automate it is crucial to be successful in automation current IT systems.
At our trainings, advanced network automation and automation with Nornir (2nd step after advanced network automation), we give you detailed knowledge of all the technologies relevant:
- Data encoding (free-text, XML, Continue reading
Infrastructure 1. Building Virtualized Environment with Debian Linux and Proxmox on HP and Supermicro
Hello my friend,
Just the last week we finished our Zero-to-Hero Network Automation Training, which was very intensive and very interesting. The one could think: it is time for vacation now!.. Not quite yet. We decided to use the time wisely and upgrade our lab to bring possibilities for customers to use it. Lab upgrade means a major infrastructure project, which involves brining new hardware, changing topology and new software to simplify its management. Sounds interesting? Jump to details!
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retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the
prior permission of the author.
What is Infrastructure Automation?
Each and every element of your entire IT landscape requires two actions. It shall be monitored and it shall be managed. Being managed means that the element shall be configured and this is the first step for all sort of automations. Configuration management is a perfect use case to start automating your infrastructure, which spans servers, network devices, VMs, containers and much more. And we are here to help you to do Continue reading
Implementing Layer-2 Networks in a Public Cloud
A few weeks ago I got an excited tweet from someone working at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: they launched full-blown layer-2 virtual networks in their public cloud to support customers migrating existing enterprise spaghetti mess into the cloud.
Let’s skip the usual does everyone using the applications now have to pay for Oracle licenses and I wonder what the lock in might be when I migrate my workloads into an Oracle cloud jokes and focus on the technical aspects of what they claim they implemented. Here’s my immediate reaction (limited to the usual 280 characters, because that’s the absolute upper limit of consumable content these days):
VMware After Gelsinger: Integrating Fiefdoms For A Post-Hypervisor World
VMware's next CEO has two tasks: to construct a narrative about VMware's role and value as a company in a post-hypervisor world, and to integrate its various fiefdoms into a cohesive set of products that can provide greater utility when used together than when used individually.
The post VMware After Gelsinger: Integrating Fiefdoms For A Post-Hypervisor World appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Repost: VMware Fault Tolerance Woes
I always claimed that VMware Fault Tolerance makes no sense. After all, the only thing it does is protect a VM against a server hardware failure… in the world where software crashes are way more common, and fat fingers cause most of the outages.
But wait, it gets worse, the whole thing is incredibly complex – you might like this description Minh Ha left as a comment to my Fifty Shades of High Availability blog post.
Making LLDP Work with Linux Bridge
Last week I described how I configured PVLAN on a Linux bridge. After checking the desired partial connectivity with ios_ping I wanted to verify it with LLDP neighbors. Ansible ios_facts module collects LLDP neighbor information, and it should be really easy using those facts to check whether port isolation works as expected.
Ansible playbook displaying LLDP neighbors on selected interface
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- name: Display LLDP neighbors on selected interface
hosts: all
gather_facts: true
vars:
target_interface: GigabitEthernet0/1
tasks:
- name: Display neighbors gathered with ios_facts
debug:
var: ansible_net_neighbors[target_interface]
Alas, none of the routers saw any neighbors on the target interface.
VMware TKGI – Deployment of Harbor Container Registry fails with error
This is an article from the VMware from Scratch series During the process of preparation to Install Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition (TKGI v1.8) on vSphere with NSX-T Data Center (v3.0.2) one of the steps is to use Ops Manager to deploy Harbor Container Registry (in this case v2.1.0). The process of deployment ended with Harbor error several times so I’m sharing here my solution in order to ease things out for you giving the fact that I didn’t come across any solution googling around. In the process, the Harbor Registry product tile is downloaded from the VMware Tanzu network portal, imported
The post VMware TKGI – Deployment of Harbor Container Registry fails with error appeared first on How Does Internet Work.
Implement Private VLAN Functionality with Linux Bridge and Libvirt
I wanted to test routing protocol behavior (IS-IS in particular) on partially meshed multi-access layer-2 networks like private VLANs or Carrier Ethernet E-Tree service. I recently spent plenty of time creating a Vagrant/libvirt lab environment on my Intel NUC running Ubuntu 20.04, and I wanted to use that environment in my tests.
Challenge-of-the-day: How do you implement private VLAN functionality with Vagrant using libvirt plugin?
There might be interesting KVM/libvirt options I’ve missed, but so far I figured two ways of connecting Vagrant-controlled virtual machines in libvirt environment:
Vendor Marketectures in Real Life
Remember my rants about VMware and firewall vendors promoting crazy solutions that work best in PowerPoint and cause more headaches than anything else (excluding increased vendor margins and sales team bonuses, of course)?
Here’s another we-don’t-need-all-that-complexity real-life story coming from one of my long-term subscribers:
Are Business Needs Just Excuses for Vendor Shenanigans?
Every now and then I call someone’s baby ugly (or maybe it was their third cousin’s baby and they nonetheless feel offended). In such cases a common resort is to cite business or market needs to prove how ignorant and clueless I am. Here’s a sample LinkedIn comment talking about my ignorance about the need for smart NICs:
The rise of custom silicon by Presando [sic], Mellanox, Amazon, Intel and others confirms there is a real market need.
Now let’s get something straight: while there are good reasons to use tons of different things that might look inappropriate, irrelevant or plain stupid to an outsider, I don’t believe in real market need argument being used to justify anything without supporting technical facts (tell me why you need that stuff and prove to me that using it is the best way of solving a problem).
Disaster Recovery: a Vendor Marketing Tale
Several engineers formerly working for a large virtualization vendor were pretty upset with me when I claimed that the virtualization consultants promote “disaster recovery using stretched VLANs” designs instead of alternatives that would implement proper separation of failure domains.
Guess what… it’s even worse than I thought.
Here’s a sequence of comments I received after reposting one of my “disaster recovery doesn’t need stretched VLANs” blog posts on LinkedIn sometime in late 2019:
ESXi VM – The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating system
For some weeks now, a couple of my virtual machines on ESXi would stop working out of nowhere. They were completely unresponsive (including via the ESXi VM Console). Nothing would help, except a shutdown / start of the VM. Just to find out later that, randomly, the VM would become unresponsive again. The only human … Continue reading ESXi VM – The CPU has been disabled by the guest operating systemVCSA, 503 Service Unavailable – possible fix
My ESXi hosting the VCSA crashed for whatever reason and after reboot the VCSA was displaying a “503 Service Unavailable” error. What I was seeing actually was a blabbering long line: The ESXi hosting my VCSA is not the fastest in the world, so I’ve waited a while, but the error was still there. Searching … Continue reading VCSA, 503 Service Unavailable – possible fixDo We Need Complex Data Center Switches for VMware NSX Underlay
Got this question from one of ipSpace.net subscribers:
Do we really need those intelligent datacenter switches for underlay now that we have NSX in our datacenter? Now that we have taken a lot of the intelligence out of our underlying network, what must the underlying network really provide?
Reading the marketing white papers the answer would be IP connectivity… but keep in mind that building your infrastructure based on information from vendor white papers usually gives you the results your gullibility deserves.
Read more ...Connecting my Dev VM to GCP: Test driving sshuttle
I have been working on a project which requires me to connect to my test environment deployed on GCP. We don’t have public IPs available for all the VMs in the test environment, but one of the VMs in the deployment is configured as a JumpHost i.e it has a public IP available. We need … Continue reading Connecting my Dev VM to GCP: Test driving sshuttleRun the Antidote network emulator on KVM for better performance
Antidote is the network emulator that runs the labs on the Network Reliability Labs web site. You may install a standalone version of Antidote on your personal computer using the Vagrant virtual environment provisioning tool.
In this post, I show you how to run Antidote on a Linux system with KVM, instead of VirtualBox, on your local PC to achieve better performance — especially on older hardware.
Why use KVM instead of VirtualBox?
Antidote runs emulated network nodes inside a host virtual machine. If these emulated nodes must also run on a hypervisor, as most commercial router images require, then they are running as nested virtual machines inside the host virtual machine. Unless you can pass through your computer’s hardware support for virtualization to the nested virtual machines, they will run slowly.
VirtualBox offers only limited support for nested virtualization. If you are using a Linux system, you can get better performance if you use Libvirt and KVM, which provide native support for nested virtualization.
When to use VirtualBox
If you plan to run Antidote on a Mac or a PC, you should use Antidote’s standard installation with VirtualBox1. Vagrant and VirtualBox are both cross-platform, open-source tools.
The Cost of Disruptiveness and Guerrilla Marketing
A Docker networking rant coming from my good friend Marko Milivojević triggered a severe case of Deja-Moo, resulting in a flood of unpleasant memories caused by too-successful “disruptive” IT vendors.
Before moving on, please note that the following observations were made from my outsider perspective. If I got something badly wrong, please correct me in a comment.
Imagine you’re working for a startup creating a cool new product in the IT infrastructure space (if you have an oversized ego you would call yourself “disruptive thought leader” on your LinkedIn profile) but nobody is taking you seriously. How about some guerrilla warfare: advertising your product to people who hate the IT operations (today we’d call that Shadow IT).
Read more ...