oVirt roles Ansible Galaxy integration

In 4.2 release we have splitted our oVirt Ansible roles into separate RPM packages and also separate git repositories, so it is possible for user to install specific role either from Ansible Galaxy or as RPM package.

The reason

The reason to split the roles into separate packages and git repositories was mainly the usage from the AWX/Ansible Tower. Since Ansible Galaxy is only integrated with github you need to store your Ansible role in single git repostiory in order to have separate Ansible role in Galaxy. Previously we used one single repository where we have stored all the roles, but because of that manual configuration was required to make those roles usable in AWX/Ansible Tower. So as you can see on image below we now have many roles in Ansible Galaxy under oVirt user:

How to install the roles

There are still two ways how to install the roles: either using Ansible Galaxy or using RPM package available from oVirt repositories.

Ansible Galaxy

You are now able to install just a single role and not necessarily all of them at once like in previous versions For example to install just oVirt cluster upgrade role, you have to run Continue reading

Customizing the host deploy process

In 4.2 release we have introduced a possibility to customize the host-deploy process by running the Ansible post-tasks after the host-deploy process successfully finishes.

The reason

Prior to oVirt 4.2 release administrators could customize host's firewall rules using engine-config option IPTablesConfigSiteCustom. Unfortunately writing custom iptables rules into string value to be used in engine-config was very user unfriendly and using engine-config to provide custom firewalld rules would be even much worse. Because of above we have introduced Ansible integration as a part of host deploy flow, which allows administrators to add any custom actions executed on the host during host deploy flow.

Special tasks file

As part of this role we also include additional tasks, which could be written by the user, to modify the host-deploy process for example to open some more FirewallD ports.

Those additional tasks can be added to following file:

/etc/ovirt-engine/ansible/ovirt-host-deploy-post-tasks.yml

This post-task file is executed as part of host-deploy process just before setup network invocation.

Example

An example post-tasks file is provided by ovirt-engine installation, at following location:

/etc/ovirt-engine/ansible/ovirt-host-deploy-post-tasks.yml.example

This is just an example file, to add some task into host deploy flow, you need to create below mentioned file Continue reading

Building a new IMDB: Internet Mince Pie Database

CC-BY-SA 2.0 image by Phil! Gold

Since joining Cloudflare I’ve always known that as we grew, incredible things would be possible. It’s been a long held ambition to work in an organisation with the scale to answer a very controversial and difficult question. To do so would require a collection of individuals with a depth of experience, passion, dedication & above all collaborative spirit.

As Cloudflare’s London office has grown in the last 4 years I believe 2017 is the year we reach the tipping point where this is possible. A paradigm-shift in the type of challenges Cloudflare is able to tackle. We could finally sample every commercially available mince pie in existence before the 1st of December. In doing so, we would know conclusively which mince pie we should all be buying over Christmas to share with our friends & families.

What is a mince pie?

For the uninitiated, a Mince Pie is “a sweet pie of British origin, filled with a mixture of dried fruits and spices called mincemeat, that is traditionally served during the Christmas season in the English world.” - Wikipedia for Mince Pie

The original Mince Pie was typically filled with a mixture Continue reading

Network Visibility with Barefoot Deep Insight

As you may have heard this week, Barefoot Networks is back in the news with the release of their newest product, Barefoot Deep Insight. Choosing to go down the road of naming a thing after what it actually does, Barefoot has created a solution to finding out why network packets are behaving the way they are.

Observer Problem

It’s no secret that modern network monitoring is coming out of the Dark Ages. ping, traceroute, and SNMP aren’t exactly the best tools to be giving any kind of real information about things. They were designed for a different time with much less packet flow. Even Netflow can’t keep up with modern networks running at multi-gigabit speeds. And even if it could, it’s still missing in-flight data about network paths and packet delays.

Imagine standing outside of the Holland Tunnel. You know that a car entered at a specific time. And you see the car exit. But you don’t know what happened to the car in between. If the car takes 5 minutes to traverse the tunnel you have no way of knowing if that’s normal or not. Likewise, if a car is delayed and takes 7-8 minutes to exit Continue reading

The variability of Internet Traffic

The post The variability of Internet Traffic appeared first on Noction.

Aerohive SD-WAN solution simplifies management of multi networks

Most people think of Aerohive Networks as a Wi-Fi vendor, which makes sense given most of the company’s revenue comes from selling wireless access points into businesses. In actuality, Aerohive is a cloud management vendor that has applied its expertise in that area to wireless LANs. About year ago, the company introduced its software-defined LAN (SD-LAN) solution that includes wireless APs and wired switches, enabling its customers to manage the entire campus network from the cloud.This week, Aerohive extended its reach into the WAN with the release of its SD-WAN solution that can be managed through HiveManager, the same cloud management tool used for its SD-LAN products, giving customers a single console for managing the WAN, wired network and wireless APs.To read this article in full, please click here

Aerohive SD-WAN solution simplifies management of multi networks

Most people think of Aerohive Networks as a Wi-Fi vendor, which makes sense given most of the company’s revenue comes from selling wireless access points into businesses. In actuality, Aerohive is a cloud management vendor that has applied its expertise in that area to wireless LANs. About year ago, the company introduced its software-defined LAN (SD-LAN) solution that includes wireless APs and wired switches, enabling its customers to manage the entire campus network from the cloud.This week, Aerohive extended its reach into the WAN with the release of its SD-WAN solution that can be managed through HiveManager, the same cloud management tool used for its SD-LAN products, giving customers a single console for managing the WAN, wired network and wireless APs.To read this article in full, please click here

Technology Short Take 91

Welcome to Technology Short Take 91! It’s been a bit longer than usual since the last Tech Short Take (partly due to the US Thanksgiving holiday, partly due to vacation time, and partly due to business travel), so apologies for that. Still, there’s a great collection of links and articles here for you, so dig in and enjoy.

Networking

• Amanpreet Singh has a two-part series on Kubernetes networking (part 1, part 2).
• Anthony Spiteri has a brief look at NSX-T 2.1, which recently launched with support for Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, further extending the reach of NSX into new areas.
• Jon Benedict has a brief article on OVN and its integration into Red Hat Virtualization; if you’re unfamiliar with OVN, it might be worth having a look.
• sFlow is a networking technology that I find quite interesting, but I never seem to have the time to really dig into it. For example, I was recently browsing the sFlow blog and came across two really neat articles. The first was on RESTful control of Cumulus Linux ACLs (this one isn’t actually sFlow-related); the second was on combining sFlow telemetry and RESTful APIs Continue reading

Software-Defined Data Centers: VMware Designs

Video: Switch Buffer Architectures

A while ago (in the time of big-versus-small buffers brouhaha) I asked JR Rivers to do a short presentation focusing on buffering requirements of data center switches. He started by describing typical buffer architectures you might find in data center switches.

Juniper: Send in the Bots for Network Peering, Testing

Telefónica is already testing the AppFormix Health Bot.

Installing the Azure CLI on Fedora 27

This post is a follow-up to a post from earlier this year on manually installing the Azure CLI on Fedora 25. I encourage you to refer back to that post for a bit of background. I’m writing this post because the procedure for manually installing the Azure CLI on Fedora 27 is slightly different than the procedure for Fedora 25.

Here are the steps to install the Azure CLI into a Python virtual environment on Fedora 27. Even though they are almost identical to the Fedora 25 instructions (one additional package is required), I’m including all the information here for the sake of completeness.

1. Make sure that the “gcc”, “libffi-devel”, “python-devel”, “openssl-devel”, “python-pip”, and “redhat-rpm-config” packages are installed (you can use dnf to take care of this). Some of these packages may already be installed; during my testing with a Fedora 27 Cloud Base Vagrant image, these needed to be installed. (The change from Fedora 25 is the addition of the “redhat-rpm-config” package.)

2. Install virtualenv either with pip install virtualenv or dnf install python2-virtualenv. I used dnf, but I don’t think the method you use here will have any material effects.

3. Create a new Python virtual environment with Continue reading

Bridging Object Storage And NAS In The Enterprise

Object storage may not have been born in the cloud, but it was the major public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform that have been its biggest drivers.

The idea of object storage wasn’t new; it had been around for about two decades. But as the cloud service providers began building out their datacenters and platforms more than a decade ago, they were faced with the need to find a storage architecture that could scale to meet the demands brought on by the massive amounts of data being created, and as well as the …

Bridging Object Storage And NAS In The Enterprise was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: 5 top data challenges that are changing the face of data centers

Data is clearly not what it used to be! Organizations of all types are finding new uses for data as part of their digital transformations. Examples abound in every industry, from jet engines to grocery stores, for data becoming key to competitive advantage. I call this new data because it is very different from the financial and ERP data that we are most familiar with. That old data was mostly transactional, and privately captured from internal sources, which drove the client/server revolution. New data is both transactional and unstructured, publicly available and privately collected, and its value is derived from the ability to aggregate and analyze it. Loosely speaking we can divide this new data into two categories: big data – large aggregated data sets used for batch analytics – and fast data – data collected from many sources that is used to drive immediate decision making. The big data–fast data paradigm is driving a completely new architecture for data centers (both public and private).To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 5 top data challenges that are changing the face of data centers

Data is clearly not what it used to be! Organizations of all types are finding new uses for data as part of their digital transformations. Examples abound in every industry, from jet engines to grocery stores, for data becoming key to competitive advantage. I call this new data because it is very different from the financial and ERP data that we are most familiar with. That old data was mostly transactional, and privately captured from internal sources, which drove the client/server revolution. New data is both transactional and unstructured, publicly available and privately collected, and its value is derived from the ability to aggregate and analyze it. Loosely speaking we can divide this new data into two categories: big data – large aggregated data sets used for batch analytics – and fast data – data collected from many sources that is used to drive immediate decision making. The big data–fast data paradigm is driving a completely new architecture for data centers (both public and private).To read this article in full, please click here

On the Leading Edge – Cloudflare named a leader in The Forrester Wave: DDoS Mitigation Solutions

Cloudflare has been recognized as a leader in the “Forrester Wave^TM: DDoS Mitigation Solutions, Q4 2017.”

The DDoS landscape continues to evolve. The increase in sophistication, frequency, and range of targets of DDoS attacks has placed greater demands on DDoS providers, many of which were evaluated in the report.

This year, Cloudflare received the highest scores possible in 15 criteria, including:

• Length of Implementation
• Layers 3 and 4 Attacks Mitigation
• DNS Attack Mitigation
• IoT Botnets
• Multi-Vector Attacks
• Filtering Deployment
• Secure Socket Layer Investigation
• Mitigation Capacity
• Pricing Model

We believe that Cloudflare’s position as a leader in the report stems from the following:

• An architecture designed to address high-volume attacks. This post written in October 2016 provides some insight into how Cloudflare’s architecture scales to meet the most advanced DDoS attacks differently than legacy scrubbing centers.

• In September 2017, due to the size and effectiveness of our network, we announced the elimination of “surge pricing” commonly found in other DDoS vendors by offering unmetered mitigation. Regardless of what Cloudflare plan a customer is on—Free, Pro, Business, or Enterprise—we will never terminate a customer or charge more based on the size of an attack.

• Because we protect over 7 Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Future is Conversational Systems

It’d be difficult to downplay the impact Amazon Web Services has had on the computing industry over the past decade. Since launching in 2006, Amazon’s cloud computing division has become the set the pace in the public cloud market, rapidly growing out its capabilities from the first service – Simple Storage Service (S3) – it rolled out to now offering thousands of services that touch on everything from compute instances to databases, storage, application development and emerging technologies like machine learning and data analytics. —Jeffery Burt @ The Next Platform

IDG Contributor Network: ROI linked to later stages of Industrial IoT

When most people think about the adoption of the IoT, they think about smart cities, autonomous vehicles, or the latest consumer tech and wearables. However, some of the most amazing technology applications are taking place within industrial verticals such as manufacturing, oil and gas (O&G), and transportation. Unfortunately, when asked about the state of IoT adoption within these markets, we’re often left relying on basic information about connected endpoints, instead of truly understanding how businesses are progressing through IoT maturity within the industrial field. To help answer these questions (and get a bit more in the weeds on the topic) my company, Bsquare, recently conducted its first Annual Industrial IoT (IIoT) Maturity Study. We polled 300 respondents at companies with annual revenues in excess of $250 million. Participants were evenly divided among three industry groups (manufacturing, transportation and O&G) and titles covered a wide spectrum of senior-level personnel with operational responsibilities, most of whom had spent an average of six years in their organizations.To read this article in full, please click here

Cumulus content roundup: December

It’s the most wonderful time of the year — that’s right, it’s time for another Cumulus content roundup! We’ve wrapped up all of the best content in a neat little package just for you. (Think of it as an early holiday gift!) Whether you’re interested in centralized configuration or just trying to learn the basics of Linux, this roundup is your roadmap for what’s in this season. The latest articles, videos, industry reports and more are at your fingertips, so get cozy by the fireplace and check out what’s new in open networking trends.

Cumulus content

Linux Networking 101 guide: Searching for an easy, comprehensive guide to Linux networking? Look no further! Download this ebook and start learning the language of the data center.

Forrester’s 2017 Vendor Landscape Report: This report will take you through the characteristics of a network that’s built for the future and help you navigate the vendor ecosystem. Read on to see if your data center is ready for 2018.

Gartner report: How open is your network vendor?: Many vendors claim to have open solutions, but which ones can support those claims? Check out this report to learn the five questions you Continue reading

Introduction to OVN and Red Hat Virtualization

Hi Folks, recently my friend and colleague, Tony James prepared and delivered an excellent webinar internally at Red Hat on how to configure Open Virtual Networking (OVN) in Red Hat Virtualization. For those of you that are unfamiliar with OVN, or what it offers, allow me to provide you with the proper illumination.

Background

Way back in the dark ages, the only way that mere mortals could get encapsulation, segmentation, and other benefits of SDN in RHV was via third party integration. Or if there was an OpenStack deployment that could be tapped into via the RHV Neutron integration. Recently though, native SDN (via OVN) is in Tech Preview in RHV 4.1, and I’m going to spend the next few posts going over the basics.

NOTE – Tech Preview is Red Hat’s way of providing the software bits for folks to try out, but there is no support for software in Tech Preview. The official statement is here. In short, the more interest and bugs filed against Tech Preview, the sooner it gets put in production.

The current fully supported virtual networking in RHV is built around “Linux Bridging”. It’s solid and it’s simple. That is to say that Continue reading