VMware Eyes Security and Networking for Docker Containers
Enterprises are combining containers and VMs for production environments, backing up VMware's arguments.
PlexxiPulse—Happy 4th of July!
Wishing you a safe and happy Fourth of July from the entire team here at Plexxi. Enjoy the celebrations this weekend!
Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week.
Network Computing: Why Hardware Still Counts In Networking
By Ethan Banks
As a host of the networking podcast Packet Pushers, I receive lots of interesting e-mail. Listeners tell us how we’re doing, share their knowledge, and voice opinions. One opinion that’s come up lately I will describe as an aversion to hardware. In the minds of some, software is king; code is a networking cure-all that will take us into the future. Chris Wahl, a fellow writer and engineer, told me he’s also heard this anti-hardware sentiment. “Did the bad ASIC hurt you?” he joked, as we tried to understand the software bias.
Network World: Can Converged Infrastructure Help IT Get Its Mojo Back?
By Colm Keegan
In “Star Wars Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back,” Yoda implores an impetuous Luke Skywalker to “unlearn what you have learned.” IT administrators who wish to stay relevant in a shadow IT universe, may want to heed the words of the legendary Jedi Continue reading
Some notes when ordering Google’s Project Fi
I just ordered my "Project Fi" phone. You probably should, too. Here are some notes (especially near the bottom on getting a new phone number).Project Fi is Google's MVNO. An "MVNO" is a virtual mobile phone company -- they don't have any of their own network backbone or cell towers, but just rent them from the real mobile phone companies (like AT&T or T-Mobile). Most mobile phone companies are actually MVNOs, because building a physical network is expensive.
What makes Google's MVNO interesting:
- Straightforward pricing. It's $20 a month for unlimited calling/texting, plus $10 per gigabyte of data used during the month. It includes tethering.
- No roaming charges, in 120 countries. I can fly to Japan, Australia, and France, and still use email, Google maps, texting -- for no extra charge.
The pricing is similar to other phone companies, a little less or a little more depending on exactly what you want. For around 3 gigs a month, Project Fi is cheaper than AT&T, but for 30 gigs, it's more expensive.
There are more and more MVNOs providing easy international roaming (like Ultra.me), and your own phone company is increasingly solving the problem. T-Mobile, for example, Continue reading
There are more and more MVNOs providing easy international roaming (like Ultra.me), and your own phone company is increasingly solving the problem. T-Mobile, for example, Continue reading
VLAN Trunking with Mikrotik RouterOS
In this post, I’m going to show you how to configure VLAN trunking with Mikrotik RouterOS, and along the way provide a brief introduction to this software and some of the functionality it offers. While it is Linux-based, RouterOS operates quite a bit differently than a lot of the other network operating systems with which I’ve worked, and so I hope that this post will help ease the learning curve a bit for others who decide to take the same path.
Background
First, let me provide a quick bit of background. I found myself in need of a switch that was both Layer 2/3 capable with both 10/100/1000Mbps ports as well as 10Gbps SFP+ ports. Of course, this was for my home lab, so budget is a concern. I cast out a quick call on Twitter, asking for some recommendations, and a few folks recommended I have a look at RouterBoard/Mikrotik; specifically, the CRS-24G-2S+IN (see here for more details). The specs looked good, the price was reasonable, and several folks expressed their satisfaction with the product, so I bought one.
Upon receiving it, I found myself trying to unravel RouterOS (their Linux-based operating system). Their wiki is fairly helpful, but Continue reading
DockerCon 2015 Videos: Day 1 of Use Case
We are continuing to post more videos from the DockerCon 2015 conference. Below are the recorded video and slides from the sessions on Day 1 in the Use Case track at DockerCon 2015. We will publish additional videos next week … ContinuedIP Address Information Collection With Custom Ansible Modules
Ansible has a very neat feature called “fact gathering”, which collects useful information from hosts prior to executing any of the tasks and makes this information available for use within those tasks. Unfortunately, this also relies on Python being available on the remote machine which doesn’t work for Cisco IOS. In this post I’ll show how to write a simple module which will collect IP address information from remote devices and store it in global variable for future use. I’ll also show how to write a module which will convert our human-readable TDD scenarios into YAML structures. As always, full code repository is available on Github
Continue reading
