5 Takeaways from a Week at #VMWorld
Another VMworld has come and gone. 23,000 people at this year’s VMWorld at the Moscone Center seemed to push the limits with standing room only at sessions and coffee in high demand, but the show was well run and the solution exchange was hopping.
I was glad to see less marketing rhetoric around private vs. public cloud, software vs. hardware, virtualized networks vs. physical networks and more focus on delivering solutions that help accelerate the deployment of workloads in ways that help customers.
Here’s a look at my 5 things that made an impression on me at this year’s show.
1. It’s a Hybrid World
A major focus (maybe the focus) of VMworld this year was what VMware calls the “Unified Hybrid Cloud.” It was good to see a strong shift from previous years where much focus was placed on defending private cloud versus public cloud. VMware is certainly taking an “inside out” strategy by focusing on their strength inside the data center and leveraging their vCloud Air public cloud services. Their ability to provide sophisticated tools for private data centers and extend that to a public resource-on-demand consumption model is certainly a strong value proposition for customers.
Organizations Can Be Twice As Secure at Half the Cost
Last week at VMworld, Pat Gelsinger made a statement that got folks buzzing. During his 
keynote, he said that integrating security into the virtualization layer would result in organizations being twice as secure at half the cost. As a long-time security guy, statements like that can seem a little bold, but VMware has data, and some proven capability here in customer environments.
We contend that the virtualization layer is increasingly ubiquitous. It touches compute, network, and storage – connects apps to infrastructure – and spans data center to device. More importantly, virtualization enables alignment between the things we care about (people, apps, data) and the controls that can protect them (not just the underlying infrastructure).
Let me speak to the statement from the data center network side with some real data. VMware has a number of VMware NSX customers in production that have deployed micro-segmentation in their data centers. Here’s what we found:
- 75% of data center network traffic is East-West, moving VM to VM regardless of how convoluted the path may be.
- Nearly all security controls look exclusively at North-South traffic, which is the traffic moving into and out of the data center; 90% of East-West traffic never Continue reading
ONF Launches New OpenFlow Testing Specification
Open Networking Foundation expects release of OpenFlow v1.3 test spec will increase certification and interoperability of SDN products.Open Source: Good Medicine Or Placebo?
Moving away from painful IETF processes to the open source model could seem like the answer for the networking industry, but a closer look reveals the pitfalls.Help a refugees would enrich ourselves
This website is for those who want to share their apartment with a refuge. You don't even have to pay -- refugee organizations will pay their share of the rent. This is frankly awesome.I grew up around refugees. Our neighbors were refugees from south Vietnam. They flew out with the fleeing American troops as the South Vietnamese government collapsed. They got onto an overloaded helicopter that had barely enough fuel to reach the aircraft carrier off the coast. That helicopter was then dumped overboard, to make room for more arriving refugees and American troops.
Because my father was a journalist reporting on El Salvadoran refugees, we became life-long friends with one of those families. She was a former education minister, he was a former businessman. It was "suggested" that she resign from government. One night, while driving home, a paramilitary roadblock stopped them. Men surrounded the car and pointed guns at them. The leader then said "wait, they've got children in the back", at which point the men put down their guns and fled. In other words, they should be dead. They fled to the United States soon after, and hid in a church basement. Since El Salvador was Continue reading
Lego Bricks and Network Operating Systems
One of the comments I got on my Lego Bricks & BFT blog post was “well, how small should those modular Lego bricks be?”
The only correct answer is “It should be Lego bricks all the way down” or (more formally) “Modularity is a concept that should be applied at every level of the architecture.”
Today let’s focus on how much easier the life would be if we could take apart the network operating systems instead of just watching them as glued-together Death Stars.
Read more ...Cisco ACI PowerTool
If you are frequent reader of this blog, it’s no surprise I’m focused on automation these days. It’s been primarily centered around using Python and Ansible with a little Puppet and Chef sprinkled in. I had the opportunity recently to change things up a bit using the Cisco ACI PowerTool and thought I’d share a few things about it.
First off, the ACI PowerTool is a PowerShell module that helps automate all aspects of a Cisco ACI fabric.
Second, it’s no a secret that the same rocket scientist created both the Cisco UCS and ACI object models. That said, the UCS PowerTool has been around for years and offers PowerShell modules that can be used to manage, operate, and automate Cisco UCS environments. As you may have guessed the Cisco ACI PowerTool is the same thing, but used to manage and automate Cisco ACI fabrics using PowerShell.
And as luck would have it, I’m still a Windows user, so I was able to get this up and running extremely fast. In full transparency, I haven’t spent much time with PowerShell at all before this, and it was super easy to get going, so no matter what your background, it’s worth Continue reading
ONF Update: OpenFlow 1.3 Testing and a Facility in South Korea
The latest developments from the ONF.
Verizon Deploys Cisco’s SD-WAN Technology
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