How to Navigate NSX-T Policy APIs for Network Automation

According to the Gartner blog post, 2019 Network Resolution: Invest in Network Automation, the top network resolution of 2019 was network automation. This isn’t surprising since traditional automation of networking and security has always been a challenge due to the cumbersome processes, lack of governance, and limited or non-existent management tools.

Organizations that automate more than 70% of their network change activities will reduce the number of outages by at least 50% and deliver services to their business constituents 50% faster

VMware NSX-T Data Center solves this by enabling rapid provisioning of network and security resources with layered security and governance. By using various network automation tools, you can quickly and effectively keep up with the demands of your developers and application owners who expect a quick turnaround on resource requests. In this blog post we’ll look at how NSX-T Policy APIs simplifies network automation.

What Are NSX-T Policy APIs?

At the center of NSX network automation lies the single point of entry into NSX via REST APIs. Just like traditional REST APIs, NSX-T APIs support the following API verbs: GET, PATCH, POST, PUT, DELETE. The table below shows the usage:

A New API Object Model

Introduced in Continue reading

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TCP Transport control Protocol -PART 1

There was a need of protocol which can sent the data over a medium that is lossy . In simple term lossy is medium where data can be lost or alter.If an error occurs, there are 2 ways it can be taken care:

• Error correction code
• Resent the data again until its properly received

Resent the data need to fulfill 2 condition to make it worth , first whether the receiver has received the packet and and second whether the packet it received was the same one the sender sent.

This method to sent signal by receiver to sender that pack is received is known as Acknowledgement (ACK). So the sender should send a packet , stop and wait until ACK arrives from receiver.Once Ack is received by sender, it sent another packet and wait for Ack and this process continues.

But this process of stop and wait gives us 2 problem to taken care

• How long should the sender wait for an ACK?
• How to recognize duplicate Packets

Lets take each problem one by one starting with second one i.e recognize duplicate packets .

• Question is how do i Recognize duplicate packet
  • Use Sequence Number -Its unique number Continue reading

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Building a Multi-Vendor Automation Platform

One of the attendees in our Building Network Automation Solutions online course sent me this question:

While building an automation tool using Python for CLI provisioning, is it a good idea to use SDK provided by device vendor, or use simple SSH libraries Netmiko/Paramiko and build all features (like rollback-on-failure, or error handling, or bulk provisioning) yourself.

The golden rule of software development should be “don’t reinvent the wheel”… but then maybe you need tracks to navigate in the mud and all you can get are racing slicks, and it might not make sense to try to force-fit them into your use case, so we’re back to “it depends”.

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Juniper Direct vs Local Routes

Juniper routers consider a directly configured IP as a “local” route, except when you use /32 mask. Then it is a “direct” route. This caused me some confusion when creating a policy to redistribute loopback IP addresses into BGP.

Route Protocol Types

A router learns routes from a variety of sources - networks configured on the box, those learned from IS-IS, rumors of prefixes from BGP or RIP, etc. You can see the full list here.

When routes are learned from different sources, Junos uses “Route Preference Values” to decide which route source to prefer. (Cisco refers to this as Administrative Distance). If routes are otherwise identical, the route with the lowest preference will be installed into the FIB.

If you’re looking at the route table, you can narrow down displayed routes to look at a specific type, e.g. show route protocol direct to see locally connected networks:

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vagrant@vqfx> show route protocol direct

inet.0: 7 destinations, 7 routes (7 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden)
+ = Active Route, - = Last Active,  Continue reading

Juniper Direct vs Local Routes

Juniper routers consider a directly configured IP as a “local” route, except when you use /32 mask. Then it is a “direct” route. This caused me some confusion when creating a policy to redistribute loopback IP addresses into BGP.

Route Protocol Types

A router learns routes from a variety of sources - networks configured on the box, those learned from IS-IS, rumors of prefixes from BGP or RIP, etc. You can see the full list here.

When routes are learned from different sources, Junos uses “Route Preference Values” to decide which route source to prefer. (Cisco refers to this as Administrative Distance). If routes are otherwise identical, the route with the lowest preference will be installed into the FIB.

If you’re looking at the route table, you can narrow down displayed routes to look at a specific type, e.g. show route protocol direct to see locally connected networks:

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vagrant@vqfx> show route protocol direct

inet.0: 7 destinations, 7 routes (7 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden)
+ = Active Route, - = Last Active,  Continue reading

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Worth Reading: The Burning Bag of Dung

Loved the article from Philip Laplante about environmental antipatterns. I’ve seen plenty of founderitis and shoeless children in my life, but it was worshipping the golden calf that made me LOL:

In any environment where there is poor vision or leadership, it is often convenient to lay one’s hopes on a technology or a methodology about which little is known, thereby providing a hope for some miracle. Since no one really understands the technology, methodology, or practice, it is difficult to dismiss. This is an environmental antipattern because it is based on a collective suspension of disbelief and greed, which couldn’t be sustained by one or a few individuals embracing the ridiculous.

That paragraph totally describes the belief in the magical powers of long-distance vMotion, SDN (I published a whole book debunking its magical powers), building networks like Google does it, intent-based whatever, machine learning…

Playing Politics with Section 230 Makes the Internet Weaker, Not Stronger

This opinion piece was originally published in The Hill.

Thursday the president of the United States signed an executive order that aims to address the liability regime of social media companies. A wide variety of reports have highlighted the problems with this move, but there is one problem that we find especially troubling: the danger of politicizing what is fundamentally a legal debate around party lines.

The president needs to stay out of this debate.

The Internet and politics have always had an awkward relationship. There have been numerous attempts to bring the Internet into mainstream politics over the years, most of which have been unsuccessful. The main reason is that the Internet is not a static “thing,” but a model for how networks and computers can interconnect through voluntary collaboration. A key characteristic of this model is that it’s decentralized, which means it doesn’t have a central point of control that dictates how the Internet should evolve. There is no switch that one can turn on and off, and as soon as policymakers or regulators try to impose one they inevitably chip away at the Internet itself. This characteristic has always been its most powerful asset, and the reason it Continue reading

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