After reading the L2 Vxlan On Catalyst blog post, I decided to add EVPN configuration templates to netlab-supported Cisco IOS/XE devices. It wasn’t the easiest EVPN implementation I encountered; here’s what I learned (hoping you’ll find it helpful).
Starting with the trivial hiccups:
It does not happen very often in the history of business that an orthogonal product is invented that almost immediately doubles the revenue pool of a market and has the prospect of tripling it over the next handful of years. …
Only A Few AI Platforms Can Survive was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Calico, Cilium, Retina, and Netobserv: Which Observability Tool is Right for Your Kubernetes Cluster? Network observability is a tale as old as the OSI model itself and anyone who has managed a network or even a Kubernetes cluster knows the feeling: a service suddenly can’t reach its dependency, a pod is mysteriously offline, and the Slack alerts start rolling in. Investigating network connectivity issues in these complex, distributed environments can be incredibly time consuming. Without the right tools, the debugging process often involves manually connecting to each node, running tcpdump on multiple machines, and piecing together logs to find the root cause. A path that often leads to frustration and extended downtime.
This is the problem that Kubernetes Network Observability was built to solve. By deploying distributed observers, these cloud-native solutions take the traditional flow entries and enrich them with Kubernetes flags and labels to allow Kubernetes users to get insight into the inner workings of their clusters.
This blog post aims to give you a rundown of the leading solutions in the CNCF ecosystem, and compare how they track a packet’s journey across your cluster.
Before diving into the specifics, let’s look at how these four Continue reading
AI projects don’t fail because models don’t work or GPUs lack performance. …
Attending GTC? Join Us For An Exclusive Roundtable Dinner On AI Data Platforms was written by Atul Chaudhary at The Next Platform.
netlab release 26.02 is out, including the usual potpourri of goodies:
The fun part, however, are the new container configuration methods:
In the modern AI datacenter – really, a data galaxy at this point because AI processing needs have broken well beyond the bounds of a single datacenter or even multiple datacenters in a region in a few extreme cases – has two pinch points in the network. …
Cisco Doubles Up The Switch Bandwidth To Take On AI Scale Up And Scale Out was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The NVIDIA GTC conference has a reputation for delivering announcements that reshape industry roadmaps. …
The Greatest AI Show On Earth was written by David Gordon at The Next Platform.
In the previous posts in this series, we covered the basics of multicast, IGMP, PIM Dense Mode, and PIM Sparse Mode. In the Sparse Mode post, we manually configured the RP address on every router in the network. This works fine in a small lab, but in a larger network with many routers, it becomes difficult to manage. If the RP changes, you have to update the configuration on every single router.
Suresh Vinasiththamby
AutoRP solves this problem by allowing routers to dynamically learn the RP address. Instead of manually configuring the RP on each router, you configure one or more routers to announce themselves as Candidate RPs. A separate router (or the same as the Candidate RP router) called the Mapping Agent collects these announcements and distributes the RP information to all other routers in the network. This makes RP management much easier and also provides a way to implement RP redundancy.
There are two methods to dynamically learn the RP address, which are Auto-RP and Bootstrap Router (BSR). In this Continue reading
Brian Linkletter published an updated overview of open-source network simulators and emulators.
containerlab and GNS3 are clear leaders (no surprise there) with the original vrnetlab becoming abandonware (fortunately, we have Roman Dodin’s fork), which makes me think we should focus on using netlab primarily with containerlab and slowly sunset the Vagrant support, particularly considering some people actively hate the license change.
Also, if anyone feels like writing an interface (provider module) between netlab and GNS3, the pull request would be most welcome 😎
Any thoughts? Please leave a comment!
This is turning into a “dog bites man” story, but the forecasts for spending in the datacenter for this year keep going up and up, and a few days ago Gartner’s economists and prognosticators finished up their tea and looked at the leaves at the common of a cup through a polished crystal ball and predicted that datacenter spending this year would go up. …
Datacenter Spending Forecast Revised Upwards – Yet Again was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.