Celebrating ECMP in Linux — part one

ECMP in Linux: A brief history

Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) routes are a big component of all the super-trendy data center network designs that are en vogue right now. Clos networks and the ECMP that underpins those designs are the best tools we have today to deliver high bandwidth, highly fault-tolerant networks. Clos networks are rich with multiple equal cost paths to get from Server A to Server B.

2 Paths from Host to ToR * 8 Paths from ToR to Leaf * 16 Paths from Leaf to Spine * 8 Paths from Spine to Leaf * 2 Paths from Leaf to ToR
= 4096 Possible Unique Paths between Server A and Server B

FYI: The above is an actual customer network. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and colors have been added because a rainbow of links is more fun!

Cumulus has been working to improve the behavior of ECMP routes in the Linux kernel over the last several kernel releases. Now, with kernel v4.17, we have achieved the milestone we set out to attain. As of Linux kernel v4.17, Linux hosts can now leverage the “5-Tuple” style hashing used inside traditional network devices for Continue reading

Virtual Instruments Integrates With Cisco SAN Telemetry, AppDynamics

The performance management company released a new version of its platform that integrates with Cisco’s new SAN telemetry streaming and AppDynamics.

Connecting to a Windows Host

Welcome to the first installment of our Windows-specific Getting Started series!

Would you like to automate some of your Windows hosts with Red Hat Ansible Tower, but don’t know how to set everything up? Are you worried that Red Hat Ansible Engine won’t be able to communicate with your Windows servers without installing a bunch of extra software? Do you want to easily automate everyone’s best friend, Clippy?

Image source: aguyiknow.com.au

We can’t help with the last thing, but if you said yes to the other two questions, you've come to the right place. In this post, we’ll walk you through all the steps you need to take in order to set up and connect to your Windows hosts with Ansible Engine.

Why Automate Windows Hosts?

A few of the many things you can do for your Windows hosts with Ansible Engine include:

• Starting, stopping and managing services
• Pushing and executing custom PowerShell scripts
• Managing packages with the Chocolatey package manager

In addition to connecting to and automating Windows hosts using local or domain users, you’ll also be able to use runas to execute actions as the Administrator (the Windows alternative to Linux’s sudo or su), so Continue reading

Worth Reading: Intel Thread Detection and the GPU

Intel announced some new innovations in anti-virus technology that leverage GPUs and AI to enhance malware protection. —Leon Chan @Tom’s Hardware

Interested in Virtualization? Check Out Our Newest Addition to the INE Library: Virtualization – Introduction to Hypervisor (KVM)

Virtualization is a key skillset for any Linux Administrator or Engineer. Not all workloads are useful in the cloud, and companies are quickly realizing this in terms of increasing cloud bills. You can bring those workloads in house, but what about licensing? KVM is a favorite of home labs because of the low cost of entry (free). KVM is also a favorite of shops that know how powerful open source is. Gain a greater understanding of how any virtualization platform works by utilizing common linux tools to manage and orchestrate your virtual machines. KVM forms the basis for upstream virtualization projects like oVirt and RHEV as well. Learn how to setup a virtualized environment only armed with an install usb from your favorite linux distribution.

Any workload can be run on a KVM virtual machine platform. Docker/Kubernetes? No problem. Databases, front end web services, workloads requiring dedicated hardware such as GPU’s or HBA’s, KVM can run any of these workloads with near bare metal performance.

What You’ll Learn:

• Setting up the hypervisor machine
• Installing your first virtual machine
• managing network storage memory and cpu resources
• Virtual machine snapshots
  Virtual machine cloning

You can watch this course on our streaming Continue reading

BrandPost: What We Can Learn from IT in Education

Among the vertical industries most impacted by technological change in the past three to five years is K-12 education. This is often overlooked, but the move to becoming digital is truly changing the game for school districts. Changes wrought by extensive device use, distance learning, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality require that K-12 schools dramatically overhaul their approach to IT. In many ways, the IT need at schools has similar or greater demands for availability, reliability, and scalability to support new applications than what is seen in other industries. However, the rapid rate of change that has occurred in K-12 is exceptional. There are some important lessons that we can learn from the “high speed” that IT professionals and administrators are responding to.To read this article in full, please click here

Making The Case For Fully Converged Arm Servers

There has been a lot of research and development devoted to bringing the Arm architecture to servers and storage in the datacenter, and a lot of that has focused on making beefier and usually custom Arm cores that look more like an X86 core than they do the kind of compute element we find in our smartphones and tablets. The other way to bring Arm to the datacenter is to use more modest processing elements and to gang a lot of them up together, cramming a lot more cores in a rack and making up the performance in volume.

This …

Making The Case For Fully Converged Arm Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Cisco Digital Network Architecture: a prison of promises or the next big thing?

Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA) promises to help companies in their digital transformation journey where new technologies can be used to accelerate business activities and processes to make them more competitive. It's also a big validation that network analytics is no longer a nice to have but a must have. Cisco DNA aims to provide a platform that companies can use as the foundation for digital transformation projects. The architecture's key tenants are virtualization, automation, analytics, a cloud-based service management layer, and open application programming interfaces (APIs). It’s a system that’s “designed for automation.” In other words, Cisco wants to make its products easier to deploy and manage. At the heart of that message is a move away from CLI. Sounds good so far.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cisco Digital Network Architecture: a prison of promises or the next big thing?

Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA) promises to help companies in their digital transformation journey where new technologies can be used to accelerate business activities and processes to make them more competitive. It's also a big validation that network analytics is no longer a nice to have but a must have. Cisco DNA aims to provide a platform that companies can use as the foundation for digital transformation projects. The architecture's key tenants are virtualization, automation, analytics, a cloud-based service management layer, and open application programming interfaces (APIs). It’s a system that’s “designed for automation.” In other words, Cisco wants to make its products easier to deploy and manage. At the heart of that message is a move away from CLI. Sounds good so far.To read this article in full, please click here

Physics Be Damned! Nokia, DoCoMo Test 5G in 90 GHz mmWave Band

The tests could break new ground in terms of supporting 5G use cases using very high mmWave spectrum bands.

Verizon Shifts Focus From 5G Fixed Wireless Trials to Commercial Launch

The operator said it is on track to launch 5G in a handful of markets later this year but is still cagey about the details. Launch cities remain a mystery.   

On the Web: Openfabric at IPspace

I was over at ipspace to talk to Ivan and several other folks about openfabric. This is one of those situations where… Well, the algorithm openfabric uses to calculate fabric location has changed slightly in the last week. Welcome to the world of networking technology.

As always, we started with the “what’s wrong with what we have right now, like using BGP as a better IGP” question, resulting in “BGP is becoming the trash can of the Internet”. You can probably guess the next set of intro questions: “Do we need policies and traffic engineering in a high-speed data center fabric?” Finally, we got to discussing OpenFabric, starting with how OpenFabric uses link-state database to modify IS-IS flooding behavior and thus reduces the total amount of flooding in a data center fabric. Next step: how do you know where it’s safe to reduce flooding? You have to figure out whether you’re a leaf or spine, and there are two ways in OpenFabric to solve that challenge.

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• InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use language for importing data, and supports standard SQL for querying data. http://InMemory.Net

• For heads of IT/Engineering responsible for building an analytics infrastructure, Etleap is an ETL solution for creating perfect data Continue reading

Fun, Games, and Cryptojacking at RSA Conference

Cyber warfare and cryptomining dominated RSA Conference keynotes and talks with technologists, who advocated a back-to-basics approach to network security.

IDG Contributor Network: Improving supply chains with the IoT and blockchain

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently advised "consumers to throw away any store-bought romaine lettuce and warned restaurants not to serve it amid an E. coli outbreak that has sickened more than 50 people in several states."This problem highlights the dangers of modern supply chains. They help lower costs and improve business efficiency, but they’re complex and a single failure can sicken people thousands of miles away. The food we eat and the medicines we use come from remote suppliers, transported in refrigerated trucks, and stored in different warehouses. How can perishable commodities be tracked from suppliers to customers? How can the temperature conditions during shipment be monitored to avoid contamination? How can spoilt products be quickly recalled even if they’re in transit or stored in a warehouse?To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: The Edge and Cloud

Low latency, reduced bandwidth, reduced backhaul — these are the axioms of edge computing, the process of moving intensive workloads from the cloud out to the edge of the network. —Megan O’Keefe @The New Stack

eBrief: Minimizing Security Challenges in the Cloud

In this SDxCentral eBrief, we look at the types of security threats that are becoming more prevalent and examine some of the latest techniques and tools that enterprises are employing to make sure that their business assets in the cloud are secure.

Interview with Michael Crosby, the OCI Technical Oversight Board Chairman

Last month the Linux Foundation announced the 2018 Open Container Initiative (OCI) election results of the Technical Oversight Board (TOB). Members of the TOB then voted to elect our very own Michael Crosby as the new Chairman. The result of the election should not come as a surprise to anyone in the community given Michael’s extensive contributions to the container ecosystem.

Back in February 2014, Michael led the development of libcontainer, a Go library that was developed to access the kernel’s container APIs directly, without any other dependencies. If you look at this first commit of libcontainer, you’ll see that the JSONspec is very similar to the latest version of the 1.0 runtime specification.

In the interview below, we take a closer look at Michael’s contributions to OCI, his vision for the future and how this benefits all Docker users.

Why are you excited about your new role as chairman of OCI’s TOB ?

I think that it is important to be part of the TOB to ensure that the specifications that have been created are generally useful and not specific to any one use case. I also feel it is important to ensure that the specifications are stable so that Continue reading

BPF, eBPF, XDP and Bpfilter… What are these things and what do they mean for the enterprise? – Netronome

A deep, comprehensive review of BPF

Deconstructing the Encryption Debate: The Internet Society-Chatham House Roundtable on Encryption and Lawful Access Report

Encryption is an important technical building block for Internet trust. It secures our infrastructure, enables e-commerce, ensures the confidentiality of our data and communications, and much more. Yet, because bad actors can also use encryption to hide their activities, it can present challenges for law enforcement.

How, or even if, law enforcement should gain access to encrypted content has remained a divisive issue for the last twenty years. Yet, even as encryption tools have grown in variety and use, the public debate has become over-simplified into a battle between those for and against encryption. That public debate often fails to address the nuances of the digital-communications and data-storage landscape, or how it has evolved. With both sides largely talking at each other, rather than listening to one another, there has been little headway towards a solution, or set of solutions, that is acceptable to all.

In October of 2017, the Internet Society and Chatham House convened an experts roundtable under the Chatham House Rule to deconstruct the encryption debate. They explored ways to bridge two important societal objectives: the security of infrastructure, devices, data, and communications; and the needs of law enforcement. The roundtable brought together a diverse set of Continue reading