Network Break 250: VMware Embraces Kubernetes; Dell Partners With VMware On Datacenters, SD-WAN

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.

BrandPost: IT Leaders Need to Get Aggressive with SD-WAN

Late last year I moderated a MicroScope roundtable in the UK on the challenges and opportunities of SD-WAN. The representatives included 12 leading SD-WAN vendors, including Michael O’Brien, vice president of worldwide channel sales for Silver Peak. I started off the discussion by introducing a data point from a TechTarget survey (TechTarget owns MicroScope) that only 26 percent of companies surveyed had an SD-WAN deployment underway. This spans any stage of the deployment cycle, including testing. Given the hype around SD-WAN and how many conversations I have with IT leaders about it, this number seemed low to me, so I wanted to get a better feel for what the leading vendors thought about it. To read this article in full, please click here

If You Have to Simulate Your Whole Network, You’re Doing It Wrong

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

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 ...

Using predictive analytics to troubleshoot network issues: Fact or fiction?

Predicting the future is getting easier. While it's still not possible to accurately forecast tomorrow's winning lottery number, the ability to anticipate various types of damaging network issues — and nip them in the bud — is now available to any network manager.Predictive analytic tools draw their power from a variety of different technologies and methodologies, including big data, data mining and statistical modeling. A predictive analytics tool can be trained, for instance, to use pattern recognition — the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data — to identify issues before they become significant problems or result in partial or total network failures.To read this article in full, please click here

The TOGAF ADM – Part II

 Continuing right off from my last post, we going to continue our run-though of the ADM wrapping the last few phases. Phase E: opportunities & Solution: Now, it’s time for us to review the outputs from our previous phases and to start defining the beginning of our implementation details. We do this in the form of creating the […]

VMworld 2019 Vendor Meeting: Lightbits Labs

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

Just Published: NSX-T Technical Deep Dive Slide Deck

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

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

Cumulus content roundup: Summer 2019

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 Installation on QEMU

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

Thread on the OSI model is a lie

I had a Twitter thread on the OSI model. Below it's compiled into one blogpost
Yea, I've got 3 hours to kill here in this airport lounge waiting for the next leg of my flight, so let's discuss the "OSI Model". There's no such thing. What they taught you is a lie, and they knew it was a lie, and they didn't care, because they are jerks.
You know what REALLY happened when the kid pointed out the king was wearing no clothes? The kid was punished. Nobody cared. And the king went on wearing the same thing, which everyone agreed was made from the finest of cloth.
The OSI Model was created by international standards organization for an alternative internet that was too complicated to ever work, and which never worked, and which never came to pass.
Sure, when they created the OSI Model, the Internet layered model already existed, so they made sure to include today's Internet as part of their model. But the focus and intent of the OSI's efforts was on dumb networking concepts that worked differently from the Internet.
OSI wanted a "connection-oriented network layer", one that worked like the telephone system, where every switch Continue reading

Thread on network input parsers

This blogpost contains a long Twitter thread on input parsers. I thought I'd copy the thread here as a blogpost.
I am spending far too long on this chapter on "parsers". It's this huge gaping hole in Computer Science where academics don't realize it's a thing. It's like physics missing one of Newton's laws, or medicine ignoring broken bones, or chemistry ignoring fluorine.
The problem is that without existing templates of how "parsing" should be taught, it's really hard coming up with a structure for describing it from scratch.
"Langsec" has the best model, but at the same time, it's a bit abstract ("input is a language that drives computation"), so I want to ease into it with practical examples for programmers.
Among the needed steps is to stamp out everything you were taught in C/C++ about pointer-arithmetic and overlaying internal packed structures onto external data. Big-endian vs. little-endian isn't confusing -- it's only made confusing because you were taught it wrongly.
Hmmm. I already see a problem with these tweets. People assume I mean "parsing programming languages", like in the Dragon book. Instead, I mean parsing all input, such as IP headers, PDF files, X.509 certificates, and so Continue reading

Heavy Networking 468: Making The Business Case For SD-WAN

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.

HPE introduces VMware services on GreenLake

HP Enterprise (HPE) has been aggressively promoting its GreenLake IT consumption model since it was introduced last year. GreenLake is a pay-per-use consumption model where the customer does not take ownership of the hardware but merely leases it and pays only for their use, which is metered.Consumption models have become popular among OEMs looking to keep customers that are anxious to get out of owning expensive assets, such as servers. Dell EMC has its own program called Flex on Demand, and Lenovo has ThinkAgile CP.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE introduces VMware services on GreenLake

HP Enterprise (HPE) has been aggressively promoting its GreenLake IT consumption model since it was introduced last year. GreenLake is a pay-per-use consumption model where the customer does not take ownership of the hardware but merely leases it and pays only for their use, which is metered.Consumption models have become popular among OEMs looking to keep customers that are anxious to get out of owning expensive assets, such as servers. Dell EMC has its own program called Flex on Demand, and Lenovo has ThinkAgile CP.To read this article in full, please click here

Weekly Wrap: AT&T CEO Donovan Departs After Paving SDN Foundation

Weekly Wrap for Aug. 30, 2019: AT&T CEO John Donovan gives his notice; VMware bets the farm on...

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