Network Programmability 101: Q&A Time
In the last video from the Network Programmability webinar Matt Oswalt answered numerous questions from the audience.
Destination Based NAT
Here is the scenario: There is a public server on the internet that you have requested access to. The “admins” that control the server agree to allow a single public IP from your entity/company to access the server. The issue arises due to the fact that you “luckily” have more than 1 Public IP at […]
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The post Destination Based NAT appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Korey Rebello.
Show 222 – Introducing The OpenClos Project
Doug Hanks and Moloy Chatterjee join Packet Pushers host Ethan Banks to discuss the OpenClos project. What is OpenClos? OpenClos is open-source software written in Python that helps stand up a leaf-spine data center. Why? Standing up a DC is a fussy business – lots of cabling, IP addressing schemes, and routing protocol configuration to […]
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The post Show 222 – Introducing The OpenClos Project appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
Creating a Network Community for the Network’s New Operational Models
The way in which networks are configured, deployed, and managed is changing. The network industry is in a shift from managing devices box by box via the CLI to having more centralized ways to manage and deploy devices. While the CLI isn’t going away anytime soon, we can look at the two operational models that are gaining traction within the network community.
SDN Controllers
SDN controllers do two major things that increase operational efficiencies. They offer a central point of management and visibility for the network team, but also offer a single point of integration for 3rd party systems – these systems could be anything from cloud management platform, monitoring or automation systems, to native business applications. Note: even when there are controllers being used by a human, there is risk. There is the risk of clicking the wrong button, forgetting the order of operations of which buttons needs to be clicked, etc. This doesn’t go away. Change control windows still have risk.
DevOps for Networking
We’ve also seen an increased amount of focus on the intersection of DevOps and networking. I’m really referring to DevOps automation tools and the network. For example, Puppet announced $40M in funding in June Continue reading
Agile development: Adopt gradually or dive in?
When the Agile Manifesto was introduced almost 15 years ago, it proposed a radical methodology change as an alternative to traditional project management. With agile, project requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration in development cycles that break tasks into small increments. While this methodology helps businesses manage unpredictability, it also requires those businesses to adopt a different mindset in order to be successful.
Agile is designed to drive collaboration, transparency, and quality within product and software development lifecycles, but it isn’t always the right answer for every organization. In fact, the signers of the Manifesto will tell you that, while there is value in examining what agile is, there is just as much value in examining what it is not.
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Debunking SSD Myths
By now everyone is aware of the performance leap offered by solid-state drives (SSDs) compared to hard disk drives (HDDs), but some SSD myths persist. It’s time to separate fact from fiction.
Myth 1: SSDs are prohibitively expensive
An SSD can cost more than its HDD equivalent when you look simply at the price tag for a given capacity. However, cost savings can be seen when you look at the amount of real-world performance each of your dollars buys. For example, one SSD can do the work of about 40 HDDs, but that SSD doesn’t cost 40 times as much. In fact, an SSD costs less when you consider the work it accomplishes.
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Poster: How To Make a Single Pane of Glass
A Poster for your desk on building a "single pane of glass" network management system.
The post Poster: How To Make a Single Pane of Glass appeared first on EtherealMind.
OpenGear at Interop – Introducing the CM7100
During my all too brief visit to Interop in New York last year, I did a quick tour of the expo hall to see if there were any interesting products around. I followed Greg Ferro’s suggestion which, to paraphrase, is to seek out the booths around the edge of the show in preference to the huge booths in the middle of the floor, because the small booths around the outside are more likely to be the startups with interesting products.
Towards the end of my “small booth” tour, I bumped into some familiar faces at the Opengear booth. I first heard of OpenGear at Networking Field Day 4 where they impressed me with the flexibility of their console server products, though to call the products “console servers” rather understates some of the product capabilities which can include RPS control, TTL I/O, GPS and 3G cellular capabilities. If you haven’t seen these products before I would encourage you to look at some of my other posts about OpenGear.
OpenGear CM7100
New for OpenGear at Interop was their CM7100 Console Server.
There’s not a lot going on on the front panel of the device, but as you’d probably expect, the back panel Continue reading
A Deeper Look at Cisco’s SDN Certifications
It’s time to look in depth at one of the SDN certs in the market: Cisco’s Network Programmability certs. I’ve written about the emerging SDN certifications before, and will continue to update those certs as news appears. However, I’ve not yet blogged to any depth about any one certification here at SDNSkills.com. This post begins a new series that does exactly that with a deeper dive into one branch of SDN certifications: those currently offered by Cisco Systems.
Series Intro
The plan for this series is as follows: Work through some details about at least half of the 8 Cisco exams related to SDN (billed as network programmability by Cisco). I think half of them should be enough to get a sense for the whole, even if I don’t look at every single one of the eight exams. For each exam, I’ll look at the associated courses, the exam topics, take the exams, and write a summary of impressions. I’ll probably weave in and out of this topic over the coming months, hitting the first exam here in January.
SDN Market and Certifications Perspective
Some of you might already be thinking: Cisco and SDN? Isn’t SDN what Continue reading
Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015
In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space.
Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Schprokits
This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the two tools that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.
I am going to separate this workshop into three main parts:
- YAML and Jinja2 – These are text-based specifications that allow Ansible and Schprokits to do what they need to do. I will be making the assumption that attendees have little to no experience with either of these things, so I will spend some time exploring how these work. There’s not enough time in the workshop to be totally exhaustive, so I will only be covering the portions of either specification that are totally relevant for use with Ansible and Schprokits.
- Ansible – These days, it’s hard to talk about automation generally without Ansible being Continue reading
Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015
In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space.
Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Python
This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the topics that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.
I am going to separate this workshop into three main parts. I’m going to start with some of the basics, and move up in “difficulty” from there.
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YAML and Jinja2 - These are text-based specifications that allows tools like Ansible to do what they need to do. I will be making the assumption that attendees have little to no experience with either of these things, so I will spend some time exploring how these work. There’s not enough time in the workshop to be totally exhaustive, so I will only be covering the portions of either specification that are totally relevant for use with Ansible.
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Ansible - These Continue reading
News Analysis: Brocade Vyatta Controller Gets a Developer Wiki
A little bird pointed out this link to me, a wiki for the developer community for the Brocade Vyatta Controller (BVC). The big idea is to help foster community for folks building SDN applications for the BVC. What do I mean by “SDN applications”? I mean an application that does something interesting, and interacts with […]Configure a Highly-Available IPSec VPN tunnel on IOS
It is possible to configure Highly-Available IPSec VPN tunnel on IOS so that the SA information is replicated between the routers. This ensures that a potential failover will be transparent to users and it will not require adjustments or reconfiguration of any remote peers.
There are two protocols used to deploy this feature, HSRP and Stateful Switchover (SSO). HSRP is one of the First Hop Redundancy Protocols that provide network redundancy for IP networks, ensuring that user traffic immediately and transparently recovers from failures in network edge devices. The protocol monitors the interfaces so that if either interface goes down, the whole router is deemed to be down and the ownership of IKE and IPSec SAs is passed to the standby router (which now transitions to the HSRP active state). SSO allows the active and standby routers to share IKE and IPSec state information so both routers have enough information to become the active router at any time.
Before we take a look at the configuration, let’s have few words about our topology. The internal network (VLAN 146 below) configuration is outside the scope of this post, but it would be normally configured with a separate HSRP instance, tracking not Continue reading
A Deeper Look at Cisco’s SDN Certifications
It’s time to look in depth at one of the SDN certs in the market: Cisco’s Network Programmability certs. I’ve written about the emerging SDN certifications before, and will continue to update those certs as news appears. However, I’ve not yet blogged to any depth about any one certification here at SDNSkills.com. This post begins a new series that does exactly that with a deeper dive into one branch of SDN certifications: those currently offered by Cisco Systems.
Series Intro
The plan for this series is as follows: Work through some details about at least half of the 8 Cisco exams related to SDN (billed as network programmability by Cisco). I think half of them should be enough to get a sense for the whole, even if I don’t look at every single one of the eight exams. For each exam, I’ll look at the associated courses, the exam topics, take the exams, and write a summary of impressions. I’ll probably weave in and out of this topic over the coming months, hitting the first exam here in January.
SDN Market and Certifications Perspective
Some of you might already be thinking: Cisco and SDN? Isn’t SDN what Continue reading
Cisco Wireless Transmit Power Control
Power substation outside a VERY large data center in Atlanta,GA.
I’m going to start out by telling you something you probably already know. Every vendor has their own way of doing things. Sometimes it makes perfect sense, and other times you end up scratching your head wondering why that particular vendor implemented this feature or product. Since I have been spending a lot more time on wireless these days, I came across an issue that forced me to reconsider how transmit power control(TPC) actually works in a Cisco wireless deployment. I thought I would impart some of this information to you, dear reader, in the hopes that it may help you. If you spend a lot of time inside Cisco wireless LAN controllers, this may not be anything new to you.
The Need For TPC
If you have been around wireless long enough, you have probably dealt with wireless installs where all of the access points(AP) were functioning autonomously. While this isn’t a big deal in smaller environments, consider how much design work goes into a network with autonomous access points that number into the hundreds. It isn’t as simple as just deciding on channels and spinning all the access Continue reading
Updated Big Switch Labs
Just a quick note to say that Big Switch have updated their demo lab system. This is an entirely virtual lab environment that simulates a Big Switch network. You can try out both Big Cloud Fabric and Big Tap Monitoring Fabric.
The lab gives you full CLI & GUI access to a sandboxed environment, with controllers, leaf/spine switches, and endpoints. Big Switch have written a sample lab you can work through, to show off the features, but you’re not limited there. You’re free to try out whatever features you like.
If you’re interested in what they’re doing, I recommend signing up.
NB: Big Switch was a sponsor of NFD8. Usual disclaimer applies
Tech Talks: Load Sharing and Entropy Labels in MPLS Networks
Load sharing in MPLS networks is always an interesting topic, and we couldn’t possibly avoid it during our MPLS-focused Tech Talks – watch the video.
After discussing the load sharing intricacies we briefly dabbled with the concept of entropy labels.