It's a heaping helping of Network Break as we try to parse all the Kubernetes pronouncements coming out of VMworld 2019, including Project Pacific and Tanzu Mission Control. Plus we cover new tech and new partnerships between Dell EMC and VMware, new products from Apstra and Mellanox, and HPE's latest financials.
The post Network Break 250: VMware Embraces Kubernetes; Dell Partners With VMware On Datacenters, SD-WAN appeared first on Packet Pushers.
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Have you ever seen a presentation in which a startup is telling you how awesome their product is because it allows you to simulate your whole network in a virtual environment? Not only that, you can use that capability to build a test suite and a full-blown CI/CD pipeline and test whether your network works every time you make a change to any one box in the network.
Sounds awesome, right? It’s also dead wrong. Let me explain why that’s the case.
Read more ...Last week at VMworld, I had the opportunity to meet with Lightbits Labs, a relatively new startup working on what they called “disaggregated storage.” As it turns out, their product is actually quite interesting, and has relevance not only in “traditional” VMware vSphere environments but also in environments more focused on cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes.
So what is “disaggregated storage”? It’s one of the first questions I asked the Lightbits team. The basic premise behind Lightbits’ solution is that by taking the storage out of nodes—by decoupling storage from compute and memory—they can provide more efficient scaling. Frankly, it’s the same basic premise behind storage area network (SANs), although I think Lightbits wants to distance themselves from that terminology.
Instead of Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), or iSCSI, Lightbits uses NVMe over TCP. This provides good performance over 25, 50, or 100Gbps links with low latency (typically less than 300 microseconds). Disks appear “local” to the node, which allows for some interesting concepts when used in conjunction with hyperconverged platforms (more on that in a moment).
Lightbits has their own operating system, LightOS, which runs on industry-standard x64 servers from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. To Continue reading
Last year when I was creating the first version of VMware NSX Deep Dive content, NSX-V was mainstream and NSX-T was the new kid on the block. A year later NSX-V is mostly sidelined, and all the development efforts are going into NSX-T. Time to adapt the webinar to new reality… taking the usual staged approach:
IPA: invariant-preserving applications for weakly consistent replicated databases Balegas et al., VLDB’19
IPA for developers, happy days!
Last we week looked at automating checks for invariant confluence, and extending the set of cases where we can show that an object is indeed invariant confluent. I’m not going to re-cover that background in this write-up, so I suggest you head over there for a quick catch-up before reading on if you missed it first time around.
Today’s paper is very much in same spirit, building on the same foundation of invariant confluence (I-Confluence), and also on Indigo which introduced an annotation model for application invariants, a invariant violation avoidance mechanism using lock reservations and escrows, and limited support for repairing violations that do happen.
With Invariant-Preserving Applications (IPAs), Balegas et al. introduce new mechanisms for avoiding invariant violations and for repairing them when detected, based on CRDTs. There’s also a very nice looking developer workflow to help ensure you’ve got all the bases covered. At the end of the day, you get the dual benefit of higher throughput and lower latency (as compared to coordination-based approaches) coupled with knowing that there isn’t some nasty invariant-violating concurrency bug waiting Continue reading
Summer has flown by and you may have missed some of the great content that was published. Don’t worry, you can catch up on some of our favorite podcasts, blog posts, and articles below. So settle in and then dive into all things open networking!
From Cumulus Networks:
Customizing your network: Take a quick look at the types of automation available in Linux, from basic to dynamic, and how these automation capabilities help to enable data center-wide orchestration here.
Kernel of Truth podcast: Network monitoring: When it comes to network monitoring, have you run into a “switch that cried wolf?”Kernel of Truth host Brian O’Sullivan is joined by two new guests to the podcast Justin Betz & Faye Ly to chat more about networking monitoring here.
Best practices: MLAG backup IP: We cover the best ways to build a redundant backup IP link for multi-chassis link aggregation (MLAG).
Exploring Batfish with Cumulus – part one: With Batfish supporting Cumulus Networks this year, we show how it can fit into pipelines & replace or complement existing testing strategies in part one of a two-part series.
Kernel of Truth podcast: Innovation in the data center: Spiderman aka Rama Continue reading
ClearOS is an operating system based on CentOS for use in small and medium enterprises as a network gateway and network server with a web-based administration interface.
ClearOS in Gateway mode acts as a firewall, gateway and server on a local network. The tutorial provides installation and configuration steps for deployement of ClearOS on QEMU VM. We will later connect ClearOS QEMU VM into GNS3 network topology in order to test features such as application traffic filtering and transparent proxy with user authentication.
Software Used:
Host OS: Kubuntu Linux 18.04.1 LTS with Qemu 3.0.0 installed and kvm-intel module loaded
Guest OS: ClearOS 7.5.0 x86_64
1. Preparing Host Network Infrastructure
As we are going to install ClearOS guest QEMU VM in a gateway mode, your host should have two network adapters available. (Picture 1). In our case, the first ClearOS guest network interface ens3 will be defined as LAN type during ClearOS installation. The second guest interface ens4 will be defined as External and used for connection to SOHO network. We will bridge the interface ens4 with the host interface enp4s0f2 using iproute utility. But first, we need to create tap interfaces tap0 and Continue reading
Building a business case for SD-WAN involves more than just anticipating savings by moving from private circuits to business broadband connections. On today's Heavy Networking, we look at how to tie SD-WAN capabilities to business benefits, what to consider when developing a business case, how measure ROI, and more with guest Jason Gintert.
The post Heavy Networking 468: Making The Business Case For SD-WAN appeared first on Packet Pushers.