Connecting my Dev VM to GCP: Test driving sshuttle
I have been working on a project which requires me to connect to my test environment deployed on GCP. We don’t have public IPs available for all the VMs in the test environment, but one of the VMs in the deployment is configured as a JumpHost i.e it has a public IP available. We need … Continue reading Connecting my Dev VM to GCP: Test driving sshuttleRun the Antidote network emulator on KVM for better performance
Antidote is the network emulator that runs the labs on the Network Reliability Labs web site. You may install a standalone version of Antidote on your personal computer using the Vagrant virtual environment provisioning tool.
In this post, I show you how to run Antidote on a Linux system with KVM, instead of VirtualBox, on your local PC to achieve better performance — especially on older hardware.
Why use KVM instead of VirtualBox?
Antidote runs emulated network nodes inside a host virtual machine. If these emulated nodes must also run on a hypervisor, as most commercial router images require, then they are running as nested virtual machines inside the host virtual machine. Unless you can pass through your computer’s hardware support for virtualization to the nested virtual machines, they will run slowly.
VirtualBox offers only limited support for nested virtualization. If you are using a Linux system, you can get better performance if you use Libvirt and KVM, which provide native support for nested virtualization.
When to use VirtualBox
If you plan to run Antidote on a Mac or a PC, you should use Antidote’s standard installation with VirtualBox1. Vagrant and VirtualBox are both cross-platform, open-source tools.
The Cost of Disruptiveness and Guerrilla Marketing
A Docker networking rant coming from my good friend Marko Milivojević triggered a severe case of Deja-Moo, resulting in a flood of unpleasant memories caused by too-successful “disruptive” IT vendors.
Before moving on, please note that the following observations were made from my outsider perspective. If I got something badly wrong, please correct me in a comment.
Imagine you’re working for a startup creating a cool new product in the IT infrastructure space (if you have an oversized ego you would call yourself “disruptive thought leader” on your LinkedIn profile) but nobody is taking you seriously. How about some guerrilla warfare: advertising your product to people who hate the IT operations (today we’d call that Shadow IT).
Read more ...Run a script on virtual machines when the host is shut down
I want to show you how to configure a host server so, when it is shut down, it executes a script that runs commands on any running virtual machines before the host tries to stop them. I will configure the host server to wait until the script completes configuring the virtual machines before continuing with the shutdown process, shutting down the virtual machines, and eventually powering off.
I had to learn how Systemd service unit configuration files work and some more details about how Libvirt is configured in different Linux distributions. Read on to see the solution, plus some details about how to test the solution in Ubuntu and CentOS.
Solution Summary
Create a new Systemd service named graceful-shutdown that runs a script when the host system shuts down, but before Libvirt shuts down any virtual machines. Ensure that the libvirt-guests service is already started and enabled, and is configured appropriately.
The graceful-shutdown.service unit configuration file
Create a new Systemd unit configuration file named graceful-shutdown.service and save it in the directory, /etc/systemd/system, where it is advised you put custom configuration files.
For example:
# vi /etc/systemd/system/graceful-shutdown.service
Enter the following text into the file, then save it:
Continue readingVMware Cloud on AWS: NSX and Avi Networks Load Balancing and Security
Authors and Contributors
I want to thank both Bhushan Pai, and Matt Karnowski, who joined VMware from the Avi Networks acquisition, for helping with the Avi Networks setup in my VMware Cloud on AWS lab and helping with some of the details in this blog.
Humair Ahmed, Sr. Technical Product Manager, VMware NSBU
Bhushan Pai, Sr. Technical Product Manager, VMware NSBU
Matt Karnowski , Product Line Manager, VMware NSBU
With the recent acquisition of Avi Networks, a complete VMware solution leveraging advanced load balancing and Application Delivery Controller (ADC) capabilities can be leveraged. In addition to load balancing, these capabilities include global server load balancing, web application firewall (WAF) and advanced analytics and monitoring.
In this blog, we walk through an example of how the Avi Networks load balancer can be leveraged within a VMware Cloud on AWS software-defined data center (SDDC).
VMware Cloud on AWS: NSX Networking and Security eBook
Check out my latest book co-authored with my colleagues Gilles Chekroun (@twgilles) and Nico Vibert (@nic972) on VMware NSX networking and security in VMware Cloud on AWS. Thank you Tom Gillis (@_tomgillis), Senior Vice President/General Manager, Networking and Security Business Unit for writing the foreword and providing some great insight.
Download the eBook for Free
I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity to publish my second VMware Press book. My first book was VMware NSX Multi-site Solutions and Cross-vCenter NSX Design: Day 1 Guide. This book was focused very much on NSX on prem and across multiple sites. In my latest book with Gilles and Nico, the focus was on NSX networking and security in the cloud and cloud/hybrid cloud solutions.
You can download the free ebook here:
In this book you’ll learn how VMware Cloud on AWS with NSX networking and security provides a robust cloud/hybrid cloud solution. With VMware Cloud on AWS extending or moving to the cloud is no longer a daunting task. In this book, we discuss use cases and solutions while also providing a detailed walkthrough of Continue reading
Service Mesh: The Next Step in Networking for Modern Applications
By Bruce Davie, CTO, Asia Pacific & Japan
What’s New in the World of Networking
As I’m currently preparing my breakout session for VMworld 2019, I’ve been spending plenty of time looking into what’s new in the world of networking. A lot of what’s currently happening in networking is driven by the requirements of modern applications, and in that context it’s hard to miss the rise of service mesh. I see service mesh as a novel approach to meeting the networking needs of applications, although there is rather more to it than just networking.
There are about a dozen talks at VMworld this year that either focus on service mesh or at least touch on it – including mine – so I thought it would be timely to comment on why I think this technology has appeared and what it means for networking.
To be clear, there are a lot of different ways to implement a service mesh today, of which Istio – an open-source project started at Google – is probably the most well-known. Indeed some people use Istio as a synonym for service mesh, but the broader use of the term rather than a particular implementation is my Continue reading
Avi Networks Now Part of VMware
By Tom Gillis, SVP/GM of Networking and Security BU
When we first announced our intent to acquire Avi Networks, the excitement within our customer base, with industry watchers and within our own business was overwhelming. IDC analysts wrote, “In announcing its intent to acquire software ADC vendor Avi Networks, VMware both enters the ADC market and transforms its NSX datacenter and multicloud network-virtualization overlay (NVO) into a Layer 2-7 full-stack SDN fabric (1).”
Avi possesses exceptional alignment with VMware’s view of where the network is going, and how data centers must evolve to operate like public clouds to help organizations reach their full digital potential. It’s for these reasons that I am happy to announce VMware has closed the acquisition of Avi Networks and they are now officially part of the VMware family going forward.
I’ve heard Pat Gelsinger say many times that VMware wants to aggressively “automate everything.” With Avi, we’re one step closer to meeting this objective. The VMware and Avi Networks teams will work together to advance our Virtual Cloud Network vision, build out our full stack L2-7 services, and deliver the public cloud experience for on-prem environments. We will introduce the Avi platform Continue reading
VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC 1.7: New NSX Features
The latest version of VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC (SDDC Version 1.7) was released recently and is being rolled out to customers. In this post, I’ll discuss the new NSX Networking and Security features.
Looking at the features released in VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC 1.7 in the below diagram, we can see the features can be grouped into three categories: Connectivity, Services, and Operations. Further below I go into more detail in each of these specific NSX features. For a complete list of all new features in VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC 1.7 in general, check out the release notes here. Continue reading
Security group support in OVN external networks
In this post I will introduce and showcase how security groups can be used to enable certain scenarios.
Security groups allow fine-grained access control to - and from - the oVirt VMs attached to external OVN networks.
The Networking API v2 defines security groups as a white list of rules - the user specifies in it which traffic is allowed. That means, that when the rule list is empty, neither incoming nor outgoing traffic is allowed (from the VMs perspective).
A demo recording of the security group feature can be found below.
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Provided tools
This repo adds tools, and information on how to use them, to help manage the security groups in oVirt, since currently there is no supported mechanism to provision security groups, other than the REST API, and ManageIQ. ManageIQ also doesn't fully support security groups, since it lacks a way to attach security groups to logical ports.
Demo scenarios
In the following links you can also find playbooks that can be built upon to reach different types of scenarios.
Building Fabric Infrastructure for an OpenStack Private Cloud
An attendee in my Building Next-Generation Data Center online course was asked to deploy numerous relatively small OpenStack cloud instances and wanted select the optimum virtual networking technology. Not surprisingly, every $vendor had just the right answer, including Arista:
We’re considering moving from hypervisor-based overlays to ToR-based overlays using Arista’s CVX for approximately 2000 VLANs.
As I explained in Overlay Virtual Networking, Networking in Private and Public Clouds and Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure (plus several presentations) you have three options to implement virtual networking in private clouds:
Read more ...A Simple Virtual Network based on proxy ARP and Policy Based Routing
Introduction Choosing a Virtual networking to connect VMs or Containers across Hosts is always a complicated decision. Most of us would have found the virtual networking on a single VM/Container Host to be very simple, easy to implement and debug. Just plug the VM/Container to a bridge and your are done. For access from the … Continue reading A Simple Virtual Network based on proxy ARP and Policy Based RoutingSystem Monitoring: Glances at Top
System monitoring is one of the topics that has got a lot of attention lately. A lot of options already exists in the open but every-time I search a for a system monitoring tool I am presented with options suitable for large scale cluster of machines, capturing metrics over time, showing trends of resource utilization … Continue reading System Monitoring: Glances at TopNo surprise performance test
Recently I had a need to deploy some python FLASK based application. Although FLASK has a convenience CLI built-in to run your application while developing the deployment documentation provided a bunch of production ready deployment method. After going through the various documentation and learning about the event loop based implementation of Gevent, I decided to … Continue reading No surprise performance testAutomating NSX-T
An attendee of our Building Network Automation Solutions online course decided to automate his NSX-T environment and sent me this question:
I will be working on NSX-T quite a lot these days and I was wondering how could I automate my workflow (lab + production) to produce a certain consistency in my work.
I’ve seen that VMware relies a lot on PowerShell and I’ve haven’t invested a lot in that yet … and I would like to get more skills and become more proficient using Python right now.
Always select the most convenient tool for the job, and regardless of personal preferences PowerShell seems to be the one to use in this case.
Read more ...Test Driving transmission for multi-site file sync
As the industry moves towards more distributed deployment of services, syncing files across multiple location is a problem that often needs to be solved. In the world of file synching there are two algorithms that are outstanding. One being rsync which is a very efficient tool for synching files. It works great when you have … Continue reading Test Driving transmission for multi-site file syncCross-vCenter NSX at the Center for Advanced Public Safety
Jason Foster is an IT Manager at the Center for Advanced Public Safety at the University of Alabama. The Center for Advanced Public Safety (CAPS) originally developed a software that provided crash reporting and data analytics software for the State of Alabama. Today, CAPS specializes in custom software mostly in the realm of law enforcement and public safety. They have created systems for many states and government agencies across the country.
Bryan Salek, Networking and Security Staff Systems Engineer, spoke with Jason about network virtualization and what led the Center for Advanced Public Safety to choosing VMware NSX Data Center and what the future holds for their IT transformation.
The Need for Secure and Resilient Infrastructure
As part of a large modernize data center initiative, the forward-thinking CAPS IT team began to investigate micro-segmentation. Security is a primary focus at CAPS due to the fact that the organization develops large software packages for various state agencies. The applications that CAPS writes and builds are hosted together, but contain confidential information and need to be segmented from one another.
Once CAPS rolled out the micro-segmentation use-case, the IT team decided to leverage NSX Data Center for disaster recovery purposes as Continue reading
Making Performance A Priority With Virtualized GPUs
VMware is not the first company that comes to mind when you think of GPU computing, but the company has quietly been developing technologies that enables performance-minded users to get the most out of these born-again vector processors. …
Making Performance A Priority With Virtualized GPUs was written by Michael Feldman at .
High-Speed IPsec on Snabb Switch on Software Gone Wild
In previous Software Gone Wild episodes we covered Snabb Switch and numerous applications running on it, from L2VPN to 4over6 gateway and integration with Juniper vMX code.
In Episode 98 we focused on another interesting application developed by Max Rottenkolber: high-speed VPN gateway using IPsec on top of Snabb Switch (details). Enjoy!
Last Week on ipSpace.net (2019W4)
The crazy pace of webinar sessions continued last week. Howard Marks continued his deep dive into Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, this time focusing on go-to-market strategies, failure resiliency with replicas and local RAID, and the eternal debate (if you happen to be working for a certain $vendor) whether it’s better to run your HCI code in a VM and not in hypervisor kernel like your competitor does. He concluded with the description of what major players (VMware VSAN, Nutanix and HPE Simplivity) do.
On Thursday I started my Ansible 2.7 Updates saga, describing how network_cli plugin works, how they implemented generic CLI modules, how to use SSH keys or usernames and passwords for authentication (and how to make them secure), and how to execute commands on network devices (including an introduction into the gory details of parsing text outputs, JSON or XML).
The last thing I managed to cover was the cli_command module and how you can use it to execute any command on a network device… and then I ran out of time. We’ll continue with sample playbooks and network device configurations on February 12th.
You can get access to both webinars with Standard ipSpace.net subscription.