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VMworld 2016 Day 2 Keynote

This is a liveblog of the day 2 general session here at VMworld 2016 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV. Today, VMware is expected to talk more about containers, end-user computing, and other topics not covered in yesterday’s general session (which focused heavily on Cross-Cloud Services, VMware’s new set of SaaS-based offerings for multi-cloud management).

The general session kicks off with Sanjay Poonen taking the stage. Poonen is an energetic speaker who’s generally very entertaining and lively. He starts his discussion with a nod to VMware’s strong customer loyalty and community, which fosters lifelong learning. That quickly transitions into a discussion of “digital transforamtion”—how technology is affecting many different areas of our lives and our society.

VMware’s proposition in digital transformation is two-fold:

  1. Transform the data center to make it cloud-ready.
  2. Preparing the end-user for the mobile-cloud era.

Poonen re-iterates VMware’s vision of “any cloud, any device, any application,” focusing primarily on Workspace ONE and the broad ecosystem that has formed/is forming around Workspace ONE. Poonen’s discussion of Workspace ONE will focus on three layers:

  1. How apps and identity work together; identity management is key.
  2. Unified management for desktops and mobile.
  3. Wrapping management and security around the entire solution.

Continue reading

VMworld 2016 Day 1 Keynote

This is a liveblog of the day 1 keynote at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, NV. I managed to snag a somewhat decent seat in the massive bloggers/press/analysts area, though it filled up really quickly. Based on the announcements made this morning, it should be a great general session, and I’m really interested to see how its received by the community.

The keynote starts with a high-energy percussion/DJ session, followed by a talk about tomorrow—from where tomorrow will emerge, what tomorrow will look like, and what tomorrow will care about. Don’t stand in line for tomorrow; you are tomorrow, because tomorrow is about people. Which way will you face? What will you do to bring about tomorrow? All of this lines up, naturally, with VMworld’s “be_Tomorrow” theme.

After that talk Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, takes the stage. He talks briefly about his foot injury, then thanks the 21 “Alumni Elite” who have attended every single VMworld. Gelsinger then moves into a discussion of buzzwords and “digital transformation,” claiming that all businesses are digital businesses, and therefore all businesses need to worry about the challenges that face digital businesses. Gelsinger talks about a couple companies that have Continue reading

Meet Me at VMworld 2016?

VMworld is upon us, and if you’ve been to the conference before you know it can sometimes be challenging to catch up with folks. (If this is your first time, now you know it can sometimes be challenging to catch up with folks.) This post is an effort to help make it a bit easier if you’re interested in meeting up with me at VMworld.

In years past, I published my schedule so that others could see what sessions I was attending, find times we could meet, etc. Now that I’m a VMware employee, registering for sessions is not permitted (customers first, as it should be!). However, it may still be helpful to show my schedule, so I’m listing it below. You can also view a read-only version of my calendar here.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

6:00 pm to sometime - vBeers at Ri Ra Irish Pub

Sunday, August 28, 2016

1:30 pm to 3:15 pm - VMworld TAM Day Ask the Experts
5:00 pm to 7:30 pm - Welcome reception in the Solutions Exchange
7:30 pm to sometime - VMUG member party

Monday, August 29, 2016

7:45 am - Prayer time (see here)
9:00 am to Continue reading

VMworld 2016 Prayer Time

For the last couple of years, I’ve helped organize a gathering of Christians for a brief time of prayer while at VMworld. This year, I’d like to again offer fellow believers attending VMworld 2016 the same opportunity to gather together for a time of prayer before starting the day. If you’re interested in attending, here are the details.

What: A brief time of prayer

Where: Mandalay Bay Convention Center, level 1 (same level as the food court), at the bottom of the escalators heading upstairs

When: Monday 8/29 through Thursday 9/1 at 7:45am (this should give everyone enough time to grab breakfast before the keynotes start at 9am)

Who: All courteous attendees are welcome, but please note that this will be a distinctly Christian-focused and Christ-centric activity. (I encourage believers of other faiths/religions to organize equivalent activities.)

Why: To spend a few minutes in prayer over the day, the conference, and the attendees

As in previous years, there’s no need to RSVP or let me know that you’ll be there, although you’re welcome to do so if you’d like. There’s also no need to bring anything except an open heart and a willingness to display your faith in front Continue reading

Technology Short Take #70

Welcome to Technology Short Take #70! In this post you’ll find a collection of links to articles discussing the major data center technologies—networking, hardware, security, cloud computing, applications, virtualization…you name it! (If there’s a topic you think I’m missing, I’d love to hear from you.)

Networking

  • MTU in OpenStack Neutron has been, as this article by Sam Yaple points out, a bit of a touchy subject. Fortunately, it looks like progress has been made on that front, so check out Sam’s post for more details.
  • Jason Edelman has an article from back in January that describes the use of Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) and Big Monitoring Fabric (BMF) in conjunction with Ansible (via some Ansible modules that Jason himself developed).
  • Dwayne Sinclair covers the basics of SpoofGuard in NSX, and how to interact with SpoofGuard via API, in this article.
  • This article is a bit more OpenStack-focused, but given that it focuses pretty heavily on Neutron I thought it’d fit better here in the “Networking” section. The article talks about how to use the --allowed_address_pairs extension to build a highly-available proxy server instead of using LBaaS.
  • Numan Siddique describes the native DHCP support available in OVN (Open Continue reading

Open vSwitch Now a Linux Foundation Project

News emerged today that Open vSwitch (OVS) has formally moved over to the Linux Foundation. This is something that has been discussed within the OVS community for a while, and I for one am glad to see it happen.

Why am I glad to see it happen? The project can finally shed itself of the (unfair) claims that the governance under Nicira (and later VMware) wasn’t “open enough.” These accusations persisted despite numerous indications otherwise. Thomas Graf, an OVS committer—who does not work for VMware, for the record—came to this conclusion in his OVSCon 2015 presentation:

OVS is one of the most effective and well governed open source projects I’ve worked on.

Moving to the Linux Foundation allows OVS to continue to grow and flourish without continued accusations of unfair governance. The project intends to continue to use its existing governance model, in which technical leadership of the project is determined by the committers, and committer status is determined by your involvement in the project via code contributions and code reviews.

For more information, refer to the official Linux Foundation press release.

Spousetivities at VMworld 2016

Many of you have asked, and here’s the answer: Yes, there will be Spousetivities at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, NV! For those of you who may be new to the VMworld scene, Spousetivities started in 2008 when my wife got together with a small group of spouses and partners traveling with the conference attendees. From there, it’s become a staple of the VMworld community events. Read on for more details on what’s planned this year at VMworld 2016!

  • First up is the famous “Getting to Know You” breakfast, but with a slightly different approach. This year you’ll be cooking breakfast with Chef Phillip Dell, winner of season 9 of “Chopped”. How cool is that?
  • There will be a walking tour of the Las Vegas Strip, in case there are folks that are new to Vegas.
  • A trip to the Grand Canyon is available. If you haven’t yet been to the Grand Canyon, this is a great way to go—private bus, meals along the way, etc. Much easier than planning such a trip yourself!
  • Of course, you’ll have the opportunity to see the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.
  • Here’s a new one: a 2-4 mile easy hike up Mount Continue reading

Technology Short Take #69

Welcome to Technology Short Take #69! In this post, I’ve collected a variety of links related to major data center technology areas. This episode is a bit long; sorry about that!

Networking

  • Lindsay Hill recently noted that he’s been working to add support to netmiko for the Brocade ICX and MLXe, and is looking into support for VDX. Netmiko, if you haven’t heard, is a fantastic Python library that’s really useful when writing Python-based network automation scripts.
  • I mentioned a while back that I was taking a deeper look at MPLS (to which my colleague Bruce Davie—one of the creators of MPLS—jokingly quipped, “Why are you looking at legacy tech?”). Honestly, I haven’t had a great deal of time to make much progress, but I did come across this article by Sudeep Goyal which helped reinforce some of the basics I already knew. It may prove useful to others who are also seeking to improve their knowledge of MPLS.
  • Peter Phaal has been writing some really interesting stuff (interesting to me, at least). First up, there’s a great article on using IPVLAN with Docker and Cumulus Linux (with a tie back to sFlow, naturally!). I’m really eager to Continue reading

Technology Short Take #68

Welcome to Technology Short Take #68, my erratically-published collection of links, articles, and posts from around the web—all focused on today’s major data center technologies. I’ve been trying to stick to a schedule that has these posts published on a Friday, but given the pending holiday weekend I wanted to get this out a bit early. As always, I hope that something I’ve included here proves useful to you.

Networking

OVS Integration with Debian Network Scripts

I had a reader contact me recently with some questions regarding the use of Open vSwitch (OVS) on Debian “Jessie” 8.5 and using the OVS integration with the Debian network scripts. For those of you that might be unfamiliar with this functionality, it’s the ability to configure OVS via instructions and directives found in the /etc/network/interfaces file. As I was helping this reader, I came across a couple potential “gotchas” that I wanted to point out here.

First, I’ll point you to the documentation for the Debian network scripts integration, which is found in this file in the “Debian network scripts integration” section. This documentation provides the complete breakdown of the various commands that can be used in /etc/network/interfaces to configure OVS.

Based on that documentation, you could create an OVS bridge and add a physical port to that bridge by including the following stanzas in /etc/network/interfaces:

allow-ovs ovsbr0
iface ovsbr0 inet manual
  ovs_type OVSBridge
  ovs_ports eth1

allow-ovsbr0 eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
  ovs_bridge ovsbr0
  ovs_type OVSPort

Now for the gotchas…

The Debian “Jessie” repos include version 2.3.0 of OVS; the latest release in the 2.3.x train is 2.3.3. As it turns Continue reading

DockerCon 2016 Vendor Meetings

While at DockerCon 2016 in Seattle today, I took some time on the expo floor to talk to a number of different vendors, mostly focused on networking solutions. Here are some notes from these discussions. I may follow up with additional posts on some of these technologies; it will largely depend on time and the ease by which the technologies/products may be consumed.

Plumgrid

My first stop was the Plumgrid booth. I’d heard of Plumgrid, but wanted to take this time to better understand their architecture. As it turns out, their architecture is quite interesting. Plumgrid is one of the primary commercial sponsors behind the IO Visor project, a Linux Foundation project, which leverages the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) subsystem in the Linux kernel. Using eBPF, Plumgrid has created in-kernel virtual network functions (VNFs) that do things like bridging, routing, network address translation (NAT), and firewalling. Combined with a scale-out central control plane and leveraging the Linux kernel’s built-in support for VXLAN, this enables Plumgrid to create overlay networks and apply very granular security policies to attached workloads (which could be VMs or containers).

Project Calico

Next, I stopped by the Calico booth. Unlike many of the networking Continue reading

DockerCon 2016 Day 2 Keynote

This is a liveblog for the day 2 keynote of DockerCon 2016, which wraps up today in Seattle, WA. While today’s pre-keynote warm-up doesn’t include laser-equipped kittens, the music is much more upbeat and energetic (as opposed to yesterday’s more somber, dramatic music). If the number of laptops on the podium is any indicator (yesterday it was a cue to the number of demos planned), then today’s keynote will include a few demos as well.

Ben Golub kicks off the day 2 keynote—with the requisite coffee shot that is a sacrifice to the “demo gods”—and offers up some thanks to the supporters of last night’s party at the Space Needle. Golub quick reviews the key announcements and demos from the day 1 keynote (see my liveblog here). Today, though, will be focused on democratizing Docker in the enterprise. In referring to Docker’s adoption in the enterprise, Golub shares some numbers that vary widely, and admits that it’s really difficult to know what the real adoption rate is. He points to multiple “critical transformations” occurring within the enterprise: application modernization, cloud adoption, and DevOps (process/procedure/culture changes).

This leads Golub into a discussion of anti-patterns, or fallacies. The first fallacy he Continue reading

DockerCon 2016 Day 1 Keynote

This is a liveblog for the day 1 keynote of DockerCon 2016, taking place over the next couple of days in Seattle, WA. Before the keynote starts in earnest, Gordon the Turtle entertains attendees with some “special” Docker containers that affect the display on the main stage: showing butterflies, playing sounds, launching a Docker-customized version of Pac-Man, or initiating a full-out battle of laser-shooting kittens.

The keynote starts with Ben Golub taking the stage to kick things off. Golub begins his portion with a quick “look back” at milestones from previous Docker events and the history of Docker (the open source project). Golub calls out a few particular sessions—protein folding, data analysis in sports, and extending a video game—and then unveils that these sessions are being presented by kids under the age of 13.

This leads Golub into a review of the efforts of Docker (the company) to democratize containers:

  • Increasing usability
  • Enhancing portability
  • Extending community

Golub gives a “shout out” to the technologies underpinning modern Linux containers (namespaces, cgroups, etc., and their predecessors) and calls out the 2,900+ contributors to the open source Docker project. He then spends the next several minutes talking about various metrics—pull requests, containers Continue reading

DockerCon 2016 Day 2 Keynote

This is a liveblog for the day 2 keynote of DockerCon 2016, which wraps up today in Seattle, WA. While today’s pre-keynote warm-up doesn’t include laser-equipped kittens, the music is much more upbeat and energetic (as opposed to yesterday’s more somber, dramatic music). If the number of laptops on the podium is any indicator (yesterday it was a cue to the number of demos planned), then today’s keynote will include a few demos as well.

Ben Golub kicks off the day 2 keynote—with the requisite coffee shot that is a sacrifice to the “demo gods”—and offers up some thanks to the supporters of last night’s party at the Space Needle. Golub quick reviews the key announcements and demos from the day 1 keynote (see my liveblog here). Today, though, will be focused on democratizing Docker in the enterprise. In referring to Docker’s adoption in the enterprise, Golub shares some numbers that vary widely, and admits that it’s really difficult to know what the real adoption rate is. He points to multiple “critical transformations” occurring within the enterprise: application modernization, cloud adoption, and DevOps (process/procedure/culture changes).

This leads Golub into a discussion of anti-patterns, or fallacies. The first fallacy he Continue reading

Configuring Linux Policy Routing using Ansible

In this post, I’m going to talk about using Ansible to configure policy routing on Linux. If you’re not familiar with Linux policy routing, have a look at this post, and also review this post for one potential use case (I’m sure there are a number of other quite valuable use cases).

As you may recall from the policy routing introductory post, there are three steps involved in configuring policy routing:

  1. You must define the new routing table in /etc/iproute2/rt_tables
  2. You must add routes to the new routing tables
  3. You must define rules for when the new routing table is consulted

All three of these tasks can be handled via Ansible.

To address step #1, you can use Ansible’s “lineinfile” module to add a reference to the new routing table in /etc/iproute2/rt_tables. For example, consider this Ansible task:

- lineinfile: dest=/etc/iproute2/rt_tables line="200 eth1"

This snippet of Ansible code would add the line “200 eth1” to the end of the etc/iproute2/rt_tables file (if the line does not already exist). This takes care of task #1.

For tasks #2 and #3, you can use a Jinja2 template. Because the creation of the policy routing rule and the routing table entries can Continue reading

Technology Short Take #67

Welcome to Technology Short Take #67. Here’s hoping something I’ve collected for you here proves useful!

Networking

  • Anthony Burke has written a script that uses VMware NSX to protect VMware Log Insight instances. More information on the script is in his blog post.
  • Russ White tackles the issue of networking engineers needing to learn to code. Is it necessary? Russ thinks so—but probably not for the reasons you might think. I tend to agree with Russ’ line of thinking.
  • This article from Marcos Hernandez shows one way to do dynamic routing in OpenStack. It’s a bit of a hack, to be honest, but it gets the job done until dynamic routing makes its way into OpenStack Neutron (which looks like it may have landed in the Mitaka release—can anyone confirm?).
  • Jason Messer has an article describing how networking works with Windows containers.
  • Tom Hollingsworth discusses how the rise of overlay networks killed large layer 2 networks and tools for building large layer 2 networks, like TRILL.
  • Dmitri Kalintsev examines some options for addressing storage-related connectivity in NSX environments.

Servers/Hardware

Spousetivities at DockerCon 2016

Long-time readers of my site know that my wife, Crystal, launched what is now known as Spousetivities at VMworld 2008. Since that time, she’s been able to organize activities for hundreds of companions at dozens of events around the world. This year she’s adding another event to the roster: DockerCon 2016 in Seattle!

That’s right, Crystal and Spousetivities will be available at DockerCon in Seattle. Here’s a quick look at some of the things she’s got planned:

  • Morning yoga on both Monday and Tuesday (both days of the conference), led by a Docker employee
  • Food tour plus a visit to Woodland Park Zoo (great option for attendees traveling with kids)
  • Tours of Seattle on both Monday and Tuesday, including stops at the Space Needle, Pioneer Square, Pike Place Market, and the Kerry Park scenic overlook.
  • Wine and chocolate tastings plus a visit to Sqonalmie Falls

All in all, it sounds like a great set of activities. Also, I’m very impressed that DockerCon is also offering childcare during the event. Between Spousetivities offering kid-friendly events both days and DockerCon providing childcare, there’s no reason not to bring the family with you to Seattle.

If you’re interested in signing up for any Continue reading

Podcast Update

As many of you probably know, I launched a new podcast, called the Full Stack Journey Podcast, back in January. (Here’s the blog post announcing the new podcast.) In this post, I wanted to provide a quick update on the podcast.

Dedicated Website Now Up

First, the podcast now has its own website! Like this site, the Full Stack Journey site is a Jekyll-powered site hosted on GitHub (here’s the site’s repository). I find the Jekyll+GitHub Pages workflow works really well for me, so leveraging the same workflow for the Full Stack Journey site—as opposed to using WordPress or some other CMS—will (hopefully) help make it easier to continue to produce and publish the podcast.

Late Episodes Available

The effort involved in getting the dedicated site up took up a fair amount of time over the last few weeks. This leads me to the second point, which is that I’ve published episode #4 with Brent Salisbury, and will soon (in the next few days) be publishing episode #5 with Patrick Kelso. These episodes are very late (sorry!). June’s episode shouldn’t be as late, and I’m aiming to be back on track with an early July Continue reading

Thoughts on Luminus Networks

Late last week, Cyrus Durgin from Luminus Networks published an article on SDx Central titled “The (R)evolution of Network Operations.” You may notice that my name is mentioned at the bottom of the article as someone who provided feedback. In this post, I’d like to share some thoughts—high-level and conceptual in nature—on network operations and Luminus Networks.

I was first introduced to Luminus Networks when I met its CEO, Kelly Wanser, at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) meeting in New York City last November. We met again in the Denver area in late December, and Kelly gave me a preview of what Luminus was building. I must confess that I was immediately intrigued by what Kelly was describing. One key thing really jumped out at me: we need to treat the network as a system, not as a bunch of individual elements.

When it comes to network monitoring/management/operations, so many of the tools are focused on the individual elements that comprise a network: provisioning a switch, pushing configuration changes to a router or group of routers, polling counters from interfaces on switches, etc. While there’s nothing wrong with any of these things, it seems to me that there’s Continue reading

Technology Short Take #66

Welcome to Technology Short Take #66! In this post you’ll find a collection of links to articles about the major data center technologies. Hopefully something I’ve included here will be useful to you. Enjoy!

Networking

  • I recently spoke at Interop 2016 in Las Vegas, and while I was there I scribbled down some notes pertaining to how decomposing applications into microservices-based architectures was similar in some respects to decomposing networks into an overlay network and an underlay (physical) network. It’s still something I’m exploring, but I hope to get something written up soon. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts about it. Feel free to hit me up on Twitter or drop me an e-mail.
  • While I’m talking about the overlay/underlay model, I found this article by Tom Nolle discussing how using the overlay/underlay model could enable agile infrastructure. It’s a good post, well worth reading (in my opinion).

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around. Maybe next time?

Security

  • In the event you’re interested in an idea of how much latency the use of in-kernel hypervisor firewalling (such as that offered by VMware NSX) adds, have a look at this article by Sean Howard.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

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