VRF Lite on Nexus 5600
One of the networking engineers using my ExpertExpress to validate their network design had an interesting problem: he was building a multi-tenant VLAN-based private cloud architecture with each tenant having multiple subnets, and wanted to route within the tenant network as close to the VMs as possible (in the ToR switch).
He was using Nexus 5600 as the ToR switch, and although there’s conflicting information on the number of VRFs supported by that switch (verified topology: 25 VRFs, verified maximum: 1000 VRFs, configuration guide: 64 VRFs), he thought 25 VRFs (tenant routing domains) might be enough.
Read more ...New CCIE RSv5 Workbook Labs & Enhancements
Foundation Lab 2 has now been added to the CCIE RSv5 Workbook. This lab is great for working on your configuration speed and accuracy when combining multiple technologies together. It also has a great redistribution section that I hope you’ll all enjoy 
More Full Scale, Troubleshooting, and Foundation labs are in progress and will be posted soon. I’ll post another update about them when they are available.
In addition to this we’ve added some feature enhancements to the workbook in response to customer requests and feedback. First, there is a new Table of Contents for the workbook that allows you to view all tasks, and to check off tasks that you’ve already completed. This will help you track your progress as you’re going through the workbook.
You can additionally check off the progress of a task in the upper right hand portion of the individual lab page.
Multiple bookmarks are now supported, and will be added to a section under the Table of Contents. When you open the workbook it will now also prompt you to load your latest bookmark.
Lastly, configuration solutions are now hidden by default when you open a lab. This will help prevent “spoilers” in the Continue reading
Know Your ASIC Inside!
We all tend to want to position a new idea and compare it to an old or familiar reference point. As the industry learns how to internalizeIPsec VPN Mikrotik to Linux
After writing the Mikrotik IPsec VPN article and I got some questions about how Mikrotik will work with a Linux device to build an IPsec VPN. I did notice that the questions were more oriented for a copy / paste solution, so I’ll provide one that it’s working. If you need more details about why the solution is like it this, please let me know.
Also don’t forget to customize the solution as you need.
DDoS flood protection
Denial of Service attacks represents a significant impact to on-going operations of many businesses. When most revenue is derived from on-line operation, a DDoS attack can put a company out of business. There are many flavors of DDoS attacks, but the objective is always the same: to saturate a resource, such as a router, switch, firewall or web server, with multiple simultaneous and bogus requests, from many different sources. These attacks generate large volumes of traffic, 100Gbit/s attacks are now common, making mitigation a challenge.
The 3 minute video demonstrates Flood Protect - a DDoS mitigation solution that leverages industry standard sFlow instrumentation in commodity data center switches to provide real-time detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks. Flood Protect is an application running on InMon's Switch Fabric Accelerator SDN controller. Other applications provide visibility and accelerate fabric performance applying controls reduce latency and increase throughput.
An early version of Flood Protect won the 2014 SDN Idol competition in a joint demonstration with Brocade Networks.Visit sFlow.com to learn more, evaluate pre-release versions of these products, or discuss requirements.
Mikrotik IPsec VPN
If you did not hear yet about Mikrotik I can’t say I blame you. Not exactly something you’ll find in SOHO network shops next to brand like TP-Link, Linksys or Netgear. Mikrotik is a company
in Latvia that produce network hardware under the name of RouterBOARD. The devices are excellent and the RouterOS support an amazing amount of feature for a SOHO product.
Business Drivers Talk at Interop 2015
This talk is a case study around some of the issues and solutions for TelePost Greenland. I’ll have to give credit to Denise Donohue and the folks there as I go along through the slides, but it’s a unique network with some extreme requirements — and therefore some interesting solutions.
Cisco Just Killed The CLI
Gallons of virtual ink have been committed to virtual paper in the last few days with regards to Cisco’s lawsuit against Arista Networks. Some of it is speculating on the posturing by both companies. Other writers talk about the old market vs. the new market. Still others look at SDN as a driver.
I didn’t just want to talk about the lawsuit. Given that Arista has marketed EOS as a “better IOS than IOS” for a while now, I figured Cisco finally decided to bite back. They are fiercely protective of IOS and they have to be because of the way the trademark laws in the US work. If you don’t go after people that infringe you lose your standing to do so and invite others to do it as well. Is Cisco’s timing suspect? One does have to wonder. Is this about knocking out a competitor? It’s tough to say. But one thing is sure to me. Cisco has effectively killed the command line interface (CLI).
“Industry Standards”
EOS is certainly IOS-like. While it does introduce some unique features (see the NFD3 video here), the command syntax is very much IOS. That is purposeful. There are two Continue reading
Open Networking Has Arrived
“My servers run on Linux. My team knows how to manage Linux servers and networks. It just makes sense for my switches to run on Linux too.”
What most people don’t know is that many high-end network switches already run on Linux.
Switches from Cisco®, Extreme Networks® and Arista® use Linux to run their switch hardware (the operating system is hidden behind abstractions and APIs). As well, most of these share the same switching silicon products from Broadcom® and Intel®.
We are in the midst of a major transformation in networking. Innovation from companies like Cumulus Networks® and Edge-Core® are leading the way, disrupting the way new networks are deployed and old networks are upgraded.
In my role as head of product engineering at Tuangru, almost every small-to-mid size hosting service provider I talk to is considering open networking. Why? Because it just makes sense.
Open network hardware is more affordable and easy to acquire. The Linux software is familiar and, in most cases, admins prefer it over the next CLI and syntax versions available.
The rise of DevOps and cloud technologies like OpenStack are driving higher levels of automation and uniformity. Continue reading
Unreliable Multicast means Unreliable VMware VSAN
Howard Marks from Deep Storage and long-term curmudgeon sent Ethan & I the following email: As I continue to tilt at the VMware windmill I’m facing fanbois telling me that all you have to do is plug the EVO:RAIL in and turn it on. This of course leaves out the fact that the little sucker still […]
The post Unreliable Multicast means Unreliable VMware VSAN appeared first on EtherealMind.
Great Wi-Fi Starts with Proper Design
I’m sure that we have all experienced poorly designed Wi-Fi networks. When a technology is so ubiquitous, so easily accessible, and is increasingly the most relied upon method of Internet access for mobile devices and cloud computing, then there are bound to be some issues. Unfortunately, the prevalence of underperforming Wi-Fi networks is still much too common for my liking.
Great Wi-Fi starts with proper design. There are various approaches to WLAN design that have evolved over time, ranging from providing basic coverage to maximum capacity and situations in-between.
At one end of the spectrum, we have a basic coverage oriented design. This was the historical way of designing a WLAN that simply involved ensuring adequate signal strength from access points was present in desired locations. At the other end of the spectrum is a design focusing on maximum capacity. This involves careful RF planning in order to integrate the most Wi-Fi cells as possible into a physical area.
The problem with both of these approaches is that they are the extremes and aren't applicable for many wireless networks. Basic coverage designs may still work for warehouses and some retailers and maximum capacity designs are great for stadiums and Continue reading
Comware5: Send test SNMP traps and syslog messages
When configuring a network device to be managed by an NMS such as HP IMC, you may want to send some test syslog or snmp traps to verify the correct operation of your settings. You can generate traps/logs by triggering … Continue reading
HP 6125XLG FCoE NPV mode white paper
The HP 6125XLG is a Comware 7 based blade interconnect switch which has full support for FCoE. I found this technical whitepaper with a sample FCoE NPV mode configuration, it is shown with uplinks to an existing Nexus 5500/6000 FCoE … Continue reading
HP Unified Wireless: Whitepapers published by HP
The HP Unified Wireless manuals are quite extensive, but it can be challenging to get a complete picture of a certain feature. HP has now published a series of whitepapers covering specific use cases and technologies, they can be found … Continue reading
Just Published: Scaling Overlay Virtual Networking Videos
The edited videos for Scaling Overlay Virtual Networking webinar are available on ipSpace.net Content site. Nuage Networks sponsored the webinar; the videos are thus publicly available (without registration).
Network Access Broker Conceptual Demo
The Network Access Broker Conceptual Demo
by Kris Olander, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer - December 16, 2014
Talk is cheap when it comes to SDN, but at Packet Design we’ve created a working SDN analytics and orchestration prototype that will enable network engineers to effectively manage hybrid networks. In this new demo, we outline how our Network Access Broker (NAB) – based on our core Route Explorer™ System – analyzes application requests for network resources, assesses their impact on services, and provisions them optimally using a combination of the following (if you’re already familiar with SDN and its management challenges, you can skip the intro and head straight to the demo at the 2:47 mark):
- A layer 3 network topology model maintained in real time (IGP, BGP, and SDN controller-provided topologies like OpenFlow),
- A traffic demand matrix,
- Predicted network loads from historical baselines, and
- Analytics algorithms that compute efficient paths based on link utilizations/end-to-end delays, model new demand, and predict the impact of link/node failures on routing and traffic. Once the optimal paths have been computed, the NAB configures the network to provision them using the SDN controller (OpenDaylight in this example).
In the NAB demo, we use Continue reading
GNS3 Holiday Mission: Free GNS3 T-Shirt
We want to hear your feedback on the networking products that made the top of your list in 2014. We are excited to launch our GNS3IPv6
Recently, I’ve heard several people suggest that the advent of IPv6 changes the requirements for data-center virtual network solutions. For instance, making the claim that network overlays are no longer necessary. The assumption made is that once an instance has a globally unique IP address that all requirements are met.
In my view, this analysis fails in two dimensions:
- In the assumption that it is desirable to give instances direct internet access (via a globally routed address);
- In the assumption that overlay solutions are deployed to solve address translation related problems;
Neither of these assumptions hold when examined in detail.
While there are IaaS use cases of users that just want to be able to fire up a single virtual-machine and use it as a personal server, the most interesting use case for IaaS or PaaS platforms is to deploy applications.
These applications, serve content for a specific virtual IP address registered in the DNS and/or global load-balancers; that doesn’t mean that this virtual IP should be associated with any specific instance. There is layer of load-balancing that maps the virtual IP into the specific instance(s) service the content. Typically this is done with a load-balancer in proxy mode.
As an aside, enabling IPv6 in the load-balancer Continue reading
Stop thief!
steal (since Linux 2.6.11)Keeping close track of the stolen time metric is particularly import when running managing virtual machines in a public cloud. For example, Netflix and Stolen Time includes the discussion:
(8) Stolen time, which is the time spent in other operating systems
when running in a virtualized environment
So how does Netflix handle this problem when using Amazon’s Cloud? Adrian admits that they tracked this statistic so closely that when an instance crossed a stolen time threshold the standard operating procedure at Netflix was to kill the VM and start it up on a different hypervisor. What Netflix realized over time was that once a VM was performing poorly because another VM was crashing the party, usually due to a poorly written or compute intensive application hogging the machine, it never really got any better and their best learned approach was to get off that machine.The following articles describe how to monitor public cloud instances using Host sFlow agents:
The CPU steal metric is particularly relevant to Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Virtual Continue reading