I am continually amazed at the productivity of the Cumulus Networks development team who recently collaborated with the Mellanox development team to do some amazing things in this new Cumulus Linux 3.1 release. Besides innovating on a number of important new software features, they added support for five new switches from Mellanox, including the first native 25 Gigabit Open Ethernet switch as well as the highest capacity 10/100GbE switch on the market.
The Mellanox SN2410 is the industry’s first generally available switch with native 25 Gigabit Ethernet (25GbE) ports. Working for *the* provider of 99% of all 25GbE NICs sold worldwide, I can say with confidence that, until now, all 25GbE servers have been connected to 100GbE switch ports via breakout cables. The SN2410 changes all that by providing 48 SFP28 ports that can natively operate in 1G, 10G, or 25G modes, which is great for cutting-edge deployments while providing backward compatibility for legacy devices. Just like 10GbE SFP+ ports, the 25GbE SP28 ports can utilize inexpensive passive copper direct-attach cables.
Without my naming names, you can safely assume that the hyperscalers and other early consumers of 10GbE are now moving to 25GbE Continue reading
In May 2013, Cisco opened its proprietary EIGRP protocol and released an informational RFC 7868 - Cisco's Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP). It gives other vendors an opportunity to implement EIGRP protocol into their devices. A group students led by an assistant professor and Cisco CCIE Peter Paluch who is an instructor trainer at the Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, University of Zilina, Slovakia implemented EIGRP support into Quagga routing software.
The goal of this tutorial is to provide a VMware vmdk disk with installed Linux Core and Quagga which supports Cisco EIGRP protocol. The image can be used to test compatibility between EIGRP configured on native Cisco devices and an implementation of EIGRP daemon in Quagga . I also share my findings about issues that I have noticed during my tests.
Here you can download Linux Core vmdk disk with installed Quagga 0.99.24-rc1 which supports EIGRP.
How did I create Quagga Qemu Image with EIGRP Support
I installed Linux Core 7.2 to Qemu virtual machine and remastered Core for sending output to a serial port according to this tutorial. I download Quagga version which supports EIGRP from github and I installed it from source. Afterwards I created Linux Core Quagga extension. I did not submit Continue reading
Sometimes people and processes are the biggest hurdles to change.