VMware NSX and vRNI Enabling Customer Operations

Recently, we had a customer challenge our team to prove to them the operational gains and demonstrate the cross-functional tooling VMware provides to assist them in scaling from zero to hundreds of VMs on the platform.  Our goal was simple –  exhibit a complete lifecycle for any customer to go from evaluation to production operation thereby enabling customer operations.  The result was a video summary demoing our enhanced tooling that complements our simple three-step workflow: environmental assessment, plan and enforcement, and then continuous monitoring.

Step 1 – Environmental Assessment:

Understanding your environment is crucial in today’s modern world of IT – and is especially key at the early stages of identifying an easy to implement micro-segmentation plan.  We’ve made this process very easy (even if you don’t have NSX in your environment yet!).  VMware offers the free VMware Virtual Network Assessment that will take that identified traffic and start to make suggested firewall and security recommendations.  Additionally, we provide correlated data and analysis to highlight useful metrics that are top-of-mind for network operators – such as the amount of East-West/North-South traffic present in your network, or how much data is seen on Continue reading

Like Flash, 3D XPoint Enters The Datacenter As Cache

In the datacenter, flash memory took off first as a caching layer between processors and their cache memories and main memory and the ridiculously slow disk drives that hang off the PCI-Express bus on the systems. It wasn’t until the price of flash came way down and the capacities of flash card and drives came down that companies could think about going completely to flash for some, much less all of their workloads.

So it will be with Intel’s Optane 3D XPoint non-volatile memory, which Intel is starting to roll out in its initial datacenter-class SSDs and will eventually deliver …

Like Flash, 3D XPoint Enters The Datacenter As Cache was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

RHV 4.1, Hosted Engine, Red Hat Summit

Hi folks, I’m still heads down on a lot of different things. The release of RHV 4.1 is right around the corner, as is a new product that involves RHV 4.1. I’ve also cut some new demo’s on Hosted Engine using RHVH – just like I promised I would several weeks ago. Ok, a couple months ago. You’ll just have to come see me at Red Hat Summit to see them…Or wait until just after Red Hat Summit. I still don’t have my “new” lab, but I did get my hands on some good gear that allows me show you the goodness that is Hosted Engine, especially with RHVH (Red Hat Virtualization Host). Hopefully I’ll have the new lab soon…..

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m presenting at Red Hat Summit again this year, focusing on providing HA for RHV – by way of Hosted Engine. Here are the session details if you’re going to be there:

Thursday, May 4, 3:30 PM – 4:15 PM – Room 152
Red Hat Summit, May 2-4, Boston, MA

I promise to give the full write-up and share the demo’s post Summit.

Captain KVM

The post RHV 4.1, Continue reading

Can you imagine Mars with Saturn-like rings?

It’s hard to fathom and may be even harder for it to happen but a couple NASA-funded scientists say Mars might have had Saturn-like rings around it in the past and may have them again sometime in the distant future.NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab said Purdue University scientists David Minton and Andrew Hesselbrock developed a model that suggests debris that was pushed into space from an asteroid or other body slamming into Mars around 4.3 billion years ago alternates between becoming a planetary ring and clumping together to form a moon.More on Network World: Elon Musk’s next great adventure: Colonizing Mars+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can you imagine Mars with Saturn-like rings?

It’s hard to fathom and may be even harder for it to happen but a couple NASA-funded scientists say Mars might have had Saturn-like rings around it in the past and may have them again sometime in the distant future. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab said Purdue University scientists David Minton and Andrew Hesselbrock developed a model that suggests debris that was pushed into space from an asteroid or other body slamming into Mars around 4.3 billion years ago alternates between becoming a planetary ring and clumping together to form a moon. More on Network World: Elon Musk’s next great adventure: Colonizing Mars+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Keeping The Blue Waters Supercomputer Busy For Three Years

After years of planning and delays after a massive architectural change, the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois finally went into production in 2013, giving scientists, engineers and researchers across the country a powerful tool to run and solve the most complex and challenging applications in a broad range of scientific areas, from astrophysics and neuroscience to biophysics and molecular research.

Users of the petascale system have been able to simulate the evolution of space, determine the chemical structure of diseases, model weather, and trace how virus infections propagate via air …

Keeping The Blue Waters Supercomputer Busy For Three Years was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Bill Gates again tops world’s billionaire list

Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, was the world's richest person in 2016, the fourth year in a row he has headed the list, Forbes said today.But Gates' fortune did not rely on the Microsoft shares he held, filings with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) showed.Forbes pegged Gates' total worth at $86.8 billion, more than $9 billion more than the next-richest person on the planet, Warren Buffet. However, in a February filing with the SEC, Gates said that he owned 174,992,934 Microsoft shares. At Monday's opening price, that portfolio would be worth approximately $11.4 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russia will strike US elections again, FBI warns

Future U.S. elections may very well face more Russian attempts to interfere with the outcome, the FBI and the National Security Agency warned on Monday.“They’ll be back,” said FBI director James Comey. “They’ll be back in 2020. They may be back in 2018.”Comey made the comment during a congressional hearing on Russia’s suspected efforts to meddle with last year’s presidential election. Allegedly, cyberspies from the country hacked several high-profile Democratic groups and people, in an effort to tilt the outcome in President Donald Trump’s favor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russia will strike US elections again, FBI warns

Future U.S. elections may very well face more Russian attempts to interfere with the outcome, the FBI and the National Security Agency warned on Monday.“They’ll be back,” said FBI director James Comey. “They’ll be back in 2020. They may be back in 2018.”Comey made the comment during a congressional hearing on Russia’s suspected efforts to meddle with last year’s presidential election. Allegedly, cyberspies from the country hacked several high-profile Democratic groups and people, in an effort to tilt the outcome in President Donald Trump’s favor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: My Data, Your Business

In times like these, it’s easy to be paranoid. Almost every day there is a new story about an app, a TV or a child’s toy that is collecting too much data, or a massive data breach, or the latest kind of ransomware doing the rounds of the Internet. We may not know the specifics, but we do know that somewhere out there someone is tracking us online: in fact, most of the data monetization machine is invisible to consumers — the individuals whose data fuels it. —The Internet Society

The post Worth Reading: My Data, Your Business appeared first on 'net work.

IBM + Red Hat = An open source hybrid cloud

IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenStack and storage teams are partnering to integrate their products and in doing so are creating a compelling hybrid offering for open source-minded customers.The announcement came at IBM’s InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, where an estimated 20,000 developers, customers and IBM partners are gathering.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How IBM wants to bring blockchain from Bitcoin to your data center +The crux of the partnership is that customers who use Red Hat’s OpenStack private cloud platform and Ceph Storage product will now be able to run both of those in IBM’s cloud. Don Bulia, a general manager in IBM’s cloud division says the idea behind the partnership is that Red Hat customers would be able to extend their Red Hat-based environments into the IBM public cloud, which will run the same management and software tools they have on premises.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yerevan, Armenia: Cloudflare Data Center #103

CC-BY 2.0 image by Marco Polo

In the coming days, Cloudflare will be announcing a series of new data centers across five continents. We begin with Yerevan, the capital and largest city of Armenia, the mountainous country in the South Caucasus. This deployment is our 37th data center in Asia, and 103rd data center globally.

History

CC-BY 2.0 image by PAN Photo

Yerevan, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, has a rich history going back all the way to 782 BC. Famous for its cognac, lavash flatbread, and beautiful medieval churches, Armenia is also home to more chess grandmasters per capita than most countries!

6 Million Websites Faster

Latency (ms) decreases 6x for UCOM Internet user in Yerevan to Cloudflare. Source: Cedexis

The newest Cloudflare deployment will make 6 million Internet properties faster and more secure, as we serve traffic to Yerevan and adjoining countries.

If the Cloudflare datacenter closest to the Equator (to date) was Singapore, the next deployment brings us even closer. Which one do you think it is?

The Cloudflare network today

－ The Cloudflare Team

50% off Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration For PlayStation 4 – Deal Alert

Includes over 50 hours of gameplay, and all-new content created to celebrate 20 years of the iconic Lara Croft. And for the first time in franchise history, players can explore the world through Lara’s eyes with the game's VR support.

Pwn2Own hacking contest ends with two virtual machine escapes

Two teams of researchers managed to win the biggest bounties at this year's Pwn2Own hacking contest by escaping from the VMware Workstation virtual machine and executing code on the host operating system.Virtual machines are in used in many scenarios to create throw-away environments that pose no threat to the main operating system in case of compromise. For example, many malware researchers execute malicious code or visit compromise websites inside virtual machines to observe their behavior and contain their impact.One of the main goals of hypervisors like VMware Workstation is to create a barrier between the guest operating system that runs inside the virtual machine and the host OS where the hypervisor runs. That's why VM escape exploits are highly prized, more so than browser or OS exploits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pwn2Own hacking contest ends with two virtual machine escapes

Two teams of researchers managed to win the biggest bounties at this year's Pwn2Own hacking contest by escaping from the VMware Workstation virtual machine and executing code on the host operating system.Virtual machines are in used in many scenarios to create throw-away environments that pose no threat to the main operating system in case of compromise. For example, many malware researchers execute malicious code or visit compromise websites inside virtual machines to observe their behavior and contain their impact.One of the main goals of hypervisors like VMware Workstation is to create a barrier between the guest operating system that runs inside the virtual machine and the host OS where the hypervisor runs. That's why VM escape exploits are highly prized, more so than browser or OS exploits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Maybe iPhone 8 will gain augmented reality — or maybe AR will replace the iPhone

Growing in stature among the many iPhone 8 (or iPhone X) rumors is that Apple might bring augmented reality to iOS 11 this summer and to its 10th anniversary iPhone this coming fall. After all, CEO Tim Cook has absolutely gushed about AR, even saying it will become an essential part of your daily life.A Bloomberg report this week that details the personnel hires, company buyouts and other efforts underway at Apple involving AR is fueling speculation that big doings are indeed afoot. Apple — which declined to comment for Bloomberg — has hired those who have worked on technologies such as Oculus, HoloLens and THX audio, and has a cross-departmental group of hundreds of engineers on the project, the report says. Gene Munster, a longtime Apple watcher who recently formed Loup Ventures to invest in companies focused in areas such as AR, VR and robotics, tells Bloomberg that AR devices could even someday replace iPhones. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SREcon17: Brave new world of site reliability engineering

Last week, I was fortunate to participate in SREcon17 Americas, a conference organized by USENIX for site reliability engineers. What’s a site reliability engineer (SRE)? Ben Treynor, founder of Google's site reliability team, once explained it’s "what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations."An important role in the DevOps practice, these engineers concentrate on reliability (of course) and scalability (at amazing levels) in highly distributed systems (microservices multiplying like rabbits). They run some of the largest websites on the planet and are inventing a new field of expertise while they do it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ARP, ARP Inspection, ARP Types and Deployment Considerations

Layer 2 security –  ARP and ARP Inspection   Introduction   This article is the second of our layer 2 attacks identification and mitigation techniques series, which will be a part of a bigger series discussing Security Infrastructure. Dynamic ARP Inspection relies on DHCP snooping technology explained in the previous article. It’s strongly recommended to […]

The post ARP, ARP Inspection, ARP Types and Deployment Considerations appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Google News: Brady jerseys more important than Trump/Russia or Supreme Court

Whether strictly the creation of an algorithm run amok or an inexplicable human error, Google News right now is demonstrating the kind of news judgment that has made it one of the company’s weakest products … and may well speak to the state of our celebrity-worshipping society.As Congress simultaneously holds hearings on Russian interference in last year’s presidential election and the pending confirmation of a justice to the United States Supreme Court, topping both stories in terms of importance, at least according to Google News, is the recovery of Tom Brady’s missing Super Bowl jerseys. Google News I’ve been a Patriots fan longer than I’ve been a journalist and I’ve been both for longer than I’d like to admit. This is nuts.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to add an external HDD to your Sony PS4

Sony's latest PS4 System Software now supports external hard drive support for the game console, letting you expand the storage from its original 500GB. Network World editor Keith Shaw shows you how to add the storage without needing a screwdriver (before this update, you could expand storage capacity by installing an internal drive).