VMware NSX and SRM: Disaster Recovery Overview and Demo
In this post, I’ll briefly expand on the benefits of utilizing NSX as part of a disaster recovery (DR) solution. For additional information check out my prior multi-site and disaster recovery with NSX posts on the VMware Network Virtualization blog. Additionally, I recently presented at 2016 US VMworld and Europe VMworld on multi-site and disaster recovery solutions and recorded sessions can be viewed here: US VMworld, Europe VMworld.
Prior NSX Multi-site and Disaster Recovery Posts:
- Cross-VC NSX for Multi-site Solutions
- Enhanced Disaster Recovery with Cross-VC NSX and SRM
- NSX-V: Multi-site Options and Cross-VC NSX Design Guide
- Cross-VC NSX: Multi-site Deployments with Ease and Flexibility
- Multi-site with Cross-VC NSX: Consistent Security and Micro-segmentation Across Sites
- Multi-site with Cross-VC NSX and Palo Alto Networks Security
With disaster recovery, two challenges in general are:
- Recovering the application with the same IP address at the recovery site; this is important because typically there are other dependencies on this IP address such as possibly security, load balancer configs, DNS, application dependencies, etc.
- Ensuring security for the application is in place for the application upon disaster recovery; traditional solutions rely on manually updating or syncing security policies across the protected and recovery sites which is Continue reading
Happy New Year
Hi Everyone,
I wish you all a Happy New Year!
Currently im very busy studying for my 2nd attempt at the CCDE Practical exam.
I have it booked for the next slot, which is February 22nd in London.
Thankfully there are more and more material available for the CCDE than just a year ago. One of my primary sources are the study group which I have mentioned before, which Daniel (lostintransit.se) and I started way back.
Im also going through the INE scenarios as well as LiveLessons available through a Safari subscription. Those are really good and I highly recommend them.
One of the primary things im practicing at the moment is picking up business requirements from a given scenario. This is quite hard as im at heart an implementation-focused guy. But its good to learn something new and very useful.
If you are not following it just yet, I can highly recommend the “Unleashing CCDE” site on Cisco Learning Network (https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/unleashing-ccde). There are alot of good posts there on how to pick up these “soft” skills.
I will keep the blog updated with my study progress through February and we’ll see what happens February 22nd 
Take Care.
/Kim
Device Configurations Are Not a Good Source of Truth
One of my subscribers sent me this question after watching the second part of Network Automation Tools webinar (or maybe it was Elisa Jasinska's presentation in the Data Center course):
Elisa mentions that for a given piece of data, there should be “one source of truth”. It gets a bit muddled when you have an IPAM tool and Git source control simultaneously. It is not hard to imagine scenarios where these get out of sync especially if you consider multi-operator scenarios.
Confused? He provided a simple scenario:
Read more ...NAT is a firewall
NAT is a firewall. It's the most common firewall. It's the best firewall.I thought I'd point this out because most security experts might disagree, pointing to some "textbook definition". This is wrong.
A "firewall" is anything that establishes a barrier between some internal (presumably trusted) network and the outside, public, and dangerous Internet where anybody can connect to you at any time. A NAT creates exactly that sort of barrier.
What other firewalls provide (the SPI packet filters) is the ability to block outbound connections, not just incoming connections. That's nice, but that's not a critical feature. Indeed, few organizations use firewalls that way, it just causes complaints when internal users cannot access Internet resources.
Another way of using firewalls is to specify connections between a DMZ and an internal network, such as a web server exposed to the Internet that needs a hole in the firewall to access an internal database. While not technically part of the NAT definition, it's a feature of all modern NATs. It's the only way to get some games to work, for example.
There's already more than 10-billion devices on the Internet, including homes with many devices, as well as most mobile phones. Continue reading
No, Yahoo! isn’t changing its name
Trending on social media is how Yahoo is changing it's name to "Altaba" and CEO Marissa Mayer is stepping down. This is false.What is happening instead is that everything we know of as "Yahoo" (including the brand name) is being sold to Verizon. The bits that are left are a skeleton company that holds stock in Alibaba and a few other companies. Since the brand was sold to Verizon, that investment company could no longer use it, so chose "Altaba". Since 83% of its investment is in Alibabi, "Altaba" makes sense. It's not like this new brand name means anything -- the skeleton investment company will be wound down in the next year, either as a special dividend to investors, sold off to Alibaba, or both.
Marissa Mayer is an operations CEO. Verizon didn't want her to run their newly acquired operations, since the entire point of buying them was to take the web operations in a new direction (though apparently she'll still work a bit with them through the transition). And of course she's not an appropriate CEO for an investment company. So she had no job left -- she made her own job disappear.
What happened today Continue reading
Big Changes in 2017
This past June when I was in North Carolina at Cisco's CPOC lab, I learned that there was a chance-albeit a slim one, but a chance nonetheless-that a position would be opening up on the CPOC team in the fall. By that point I had been to CPOC three times and knew many of the engineers who worked there. I spoke to them to get their feedback, met with the newly-hired manager of the team, and just generally did all the things I thought I should be doing to take advantage of my time being face to face with these folks.Some Reading on Application Containers
One aspect of my pending migration to Ubuntu Linux on my primary laptop has been the opportunity to explore “non-traditional” uses for Linux containers. In particular, the idea of using Docker (or systemd-nspawn or rkt) to serve as a sandbox (of sorts) for GUI applications really intrigues me. This isn’t a use case that many of the container mechanisms are aiming to solve, but it’s an interesting use case nevertheless (to me, anyway).
So, in no particular order, here are a few articles I found about using Linux containers as application containers/sandboxes (mostly focused around GUI applications):
A Docker-Like Container Management using systemd
Running containers without Docker
Containerizing Graphical Applications on Linux with systemd-nspawn
Debian Containers with systemd-nspawn
Using your own containers with systemd-nspawn and overlayfs
I was successful in using Docker to containerize Firefox (see my “dockerfiles” repository on GitHub)), and was also successful in using systemd-nspawn in the same way, including the use of overlayfs. My experiments have been quite helpful and informative; I have some ideas that may percolate into future blog posts.
Migrate phpipam to new server
How to migrate phpipam data to new severReset phpipam admin password
How to reset admin password for phpipamA Postscript to the Leap Second
The inexorable progress of time clocked past the New Year and at 23:59:60 on the 31st December 2016 UTC the leap second claimed another victim. This time Cloudflare described how the Leap Second caused some DNS failures in Cloudflare’s infrastructure. What's going on here? It should not have been a surprise, yet we still see failing systems.After Two Years, Do I Find Self-Employment Worthwhile?
In March 2015, I started working for myself exclusively. That is to say, I went from working for someone else full-time while also operating my own company full-time to working strictly for my own company. How am I feeling after nearly two years of self-employment?
Fulfillment
Working for myself has proven to be fulfilling. I like the correlations to be found among opportunity, effort, risk, reward, and failure. I can weigh all of those things, make a decision of how to proceed, and benefit (or suffer) directly in accordance with my decisions. That is fulfilling to me.
Suffering, by the way, isn’t a bad thing. We could all stand to do a bit more of it today, so that we do a bit less of it tomorrow.
Process
I am free of silly processes that cripple my ability to get things done, not that I believe process is inherently bad. With my own company, I still have to define processes, but I can keep them both streamlined and fluid. I’m also free to let the people that work with me define their own processes, with me providing only the input required to achieve the desired result.
Balance
When working for other employers as an IT professional, Continue reading