Gian Paolo Boarina published a great article following my Are You Solving the Right Problem rant.
Long story short: everyone in the networking game has their own agenda, and it’s not necessarily good for you or your business.
In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner.
In the second half of our discussion (first half is here) we focused on these topics:
Read more ...In the past 5+ years I ran at least one Data Center Fabrics Update webinar per year to cover new hardware and software launched by data center switching vendors.
The rate of product and feature launches in data center switching market is slowing down, so I decided to insert the information on new hardware and software features launched in 2017 directly into the merged videos describing the progress various vendors made in the last years.
First in line: Arista EOS. You can access the videos if you bought the webinar recording in the past or if you have an active ipSpace.net subscription.
One of my friends sent me this design challenge:
Assume you’re migrating from another WAN transport technology to MPLS. The existing network has 3000 routes but the MPLS carrier is limiting you to 1000 routes. How could you solve this with MPLS?
Personally, I think MPLS is a red herring.
A better question would be “how do you reduce the number of routes transported across your WAN network” or “how do you reduce the routing interaction with your MPLS service providers” (particularly intriguing if you use more than one of them).
As always, there are several options and it’s impossible to recommend the best one:
With all the intent-based hype (and the previous SDN-will-rule-the-world-hype) you’d think that the network is the ultimate ossified roadblock on the path to agile nirvana.
You’d be totally wrong (and you’d deserve it – never trust a vendor peddling a product).
Here’s an amazing discovery I made when I was still running on-site SDN and network automation workshops.
Read more ...Here’s the list of webinars and events planned for October and November 2017:
Hint: you get access to all live webinar sessions, and 170 hours of downloadable videos with ipSpace.net subscription.
An update of PERL libraries broke a number of my scripts (don't ask). Here's the current status:
Anything else not working? Please write a comment or send me an email. Thank you!
A while ago a large airline had a bad-hair day claiming it was caused by a faulty power supply. Not surprisingly, I got a question along the lines of “is that feasible?”
Short answer: Yes. However, someone should be really worried if that wasn’t made up.
Read more ...Here’s a common scenario I’m encountering on Ansible-related forums:
Q: I cannot connect to network devices with my Ansible network modules. I keep getting these weird error messages…
Me: Are you sure you have the device SSH keys in known_hosts file?
Q: How did you know?
Read more ...In the Future of Networking with Fred Baker Fred mentioned an interesting IPv6 deployment scenario: give a /64 prefix to every server to support container deployment, and run routing protocols between servers and ToR switches to advertise the /64 prefix to the data center fabric preferably using link-local addresses.
Let’s recap:
Read more ...Joel Knight published his blogging toolkit and processes he uses to write blog posts. Definitely worth reading even if you never plan to blog as he nicely documents how to sync creative process across multiple platforms.
A while ago I got a kind email from Kireeti Kompella, CTO @ Juniper Networks, saying “A colleague sent me an email of yours regarding SDN, the trough of disillusionment, and the rise of automation. Here's a more dramatic view: the Self-Driving Network -- one whose operation is totally automated.”
Even though Software Gone Wild podcast focuses on practical ideas that you could deploy relatively soon in your network, we decided to make an exception and talk about (as one of my friends described it) a unicorn driving a flying DeLorean with a flux capacitor.
Read more ...One of my readers was wondering about the stability and scalability of large layer-2 domains implemented with VXLAN. He wrote:
If common BUM traffic (e.g. ARP) is being handled/localized by the network (e.g. NSX or ACI), and if we are managing what traffic hosts can send with micro-segmentation style filtering blocking broadcast/multicast, are large layer-2 domains still a recipe for disaster?
There are three major (fundamental) problems with large L2 domains:
Read more ...If you’re a long-time reader of my blog you probably know that I believe in learning the fundamentals before trying to do anything else (like Google-and-Paste spaghetti wall approach), so you could imagine my delight when I got this feedback from an engineer watching (free) Network Programmability 101 webinar:
I was expecting a technical webinar, so I was a little bit disappointed at first with a “meta” webinar, but as I got through I was more than happy; learning such a meta sphere or getting to know other mindsets is very useful for me. The webinar pushed me to think outside of my little world and to open my mind.
That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve with the high-level webinars. So glad to hear it worked ;))
Read more ...One of the perks of my online courses is the lifetime access to course Slack team, and you’d amazed by the variety of questions asked there. Not so long ago I got one on BGP timers:
The BGP timers I’m using in my network are 5 and 15 seconds, and I am not sure if it's a good practice to reduce them even more.
You should always ask yourself this set of questions before tweaking a nerd knob:
Read more ...Getting bored sitting at San Jose airport waiting for Vagrant to update guest additions in my Ubuntu VM (first item on my to-do list: prepare final version of material for next week’s Docker workshop), so here are my very first impressions of Networking Field Day 16 presentations we’ve seen in the last three days.
As always, there were great presentations, good presentations, … and a few that are best forgotten. I won’t mention those.
Read more ...Long story short: I’m offering a few free seats in my Ansible for Networking Engineers online course to undergraduate or master’s students.
Interested? Check out the details, and apply before October 1st.
Too old? Please spread the word ;)
PowerShell is a great scripting environment if your vendor provided PowerShell libraries to control their software or devices… but what if all you got is REST API (example: Nexus switches)?
We’ll conveniently ignore the challenges of managing devices that use 30-year-old non-scriptable CLI.
Read more ...A month ago I told you how dr. Olivier Bonaventure starts his networking course with IPv6. But there’s more: the full textbook for the undergraduate course (Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice) is open-sourced and available (in source form) on GitHub.
You might wonder why I’m so enthusiastic, so let me tell you another story…
Read more ...The featured webinar in September 2017 is the Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar, and in the featured videos you'll learn what Jinja2 is and how you can use it to generate network device configurations with Ansible.
If you already have an trial subscription, log into my.ipspace.net, select the Ansible webinar from the first page, and watch the videos marked with star. To start your trial subscription, register here.
Read more ...