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Use Rate-Limiting to Alleviate Link Saturation

At some point in time you may come across a scenario in which you notice a WAN link at a branch site is being saturated. You then have to weigh your options to mitigate the saturation because it can cause intermittent network outages and other issues. In this scenario we will use rate-limiting on the […]

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The post Use Rate-Limiting to Alleviate Link Saturation appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Korey Rebello.

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Cisco Live 2015 – Customer Appreciation Event Featuring Aerosmith!!

Yes, you heard me right. Aerosmith!

One of the most looked forward to social events for Cisco Live has always been the Customer Appreciation Events (CAE). Cisco rarely let’s us down when throwing this shindig, and has amazed us in the past with renting out resorts, baseball stadiums, and even Universal Studios.

This year, the CAE will be held on Wednesday June 10th at 7:30 inside Petco Park which is just a short walk from the convention center. With Aerosmith headlining this event it is sure to be huge! So if you haven’t already registered for CLUS15, be sure to do so NOW!!!

In other news, it seems that CDW is sponsering a new outdoor social media area for us to connect and hang out by the waterfront. Currently I believe this to be in addition to the normal social media hub that Cisco has been providing us since 2012.

This rendering of the area seems to indicate that it is located behind the convention center, probably in this area…

If you have any questions about this years event please reach out to @CiscoLive on twitter, or on Facebook!

The post Cisco Live 2015 – Customer Appreciation Event Continue reading

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Cisco Live 2015 – Announcements – I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing

In case the above video has not given it away, the CAE band on Wednesday June 10th @ 7:30 at Petco Park for Cisco Live 2015 is none other than Aerosmith!  We have had some great bands over the years (KISS, Lenny Kravitz, Imagine Dragons, OK GO, just to name a few) and I suspect that this […]

The post Cisco Live 2015 – Announcements – I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing appeared first on Fryguy's Blog.

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A Quick Introduction to Consul

For reasons that (hopefully) will become clear in the relatively near future, I decided I needed to take a look at Consul, a distributed service discovery tool and key value store. I know Consul’s description sounds like a mouthful of buzzwords, but it’s pretty accurate. This post provides a quick introduction to Consul, in which I’ll break down what Consul does and how it works (at a high level). I’ll then build on this introduction in later posts.

There’s a lot to Consul, so let’s start by breaking down the description of Consul, which I provided as “a distributed service discovery tool and key value store”. What does this mean, exactly?

• Consul is distributed. This means it runs as a cluster of systems so that there is no single point of failure. Consul uses a gossip protocol (known as Serf) to manage cluster membership, failure detection, and general orchestration. Managing cluster state via Serf is only part of the picture, though; the cluster must also manage consistency via a consensus protocol known as Raft. (Raft is the same consensus protocol used by etcd, for example.)
• Consul is also a service discovery tool. Applications can register with Continue reading

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iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 2/06/2015

Please join us in congratulating the following iPexpert client’s who have passed their CCIE lab!

This Week’s CCIE Success Stories

• Shawn Wilson, CCIE #46739 (Collaboration)
• Gaurav Sharma, CCIE #44785 (Data Center)
• Theogene Nishimwe, CCIE #44776 (Collaboration)
• Rakesh Jain, CCIE #44775 (Collaboration)

We Want to Hear From You!

Have you passed your CCIE lab exam and used any of iPexpert’s self-study products, or attended a CCIE Bootcamp? If so, we’d like to add you to our CCIE Wall of Fame!

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Plexxi Pulse – Big Data is Driving Datacenter Infrastructure Development

You may have seen last week that we partnered with Cloudera, certifying the Plexxi Switch on Cloudera’s Enterprise 5 platform.

This partnership, while exciting for us and our partners, plays a larger role in the IT landscape as a whole. According to an article this week by Arthur Cole of Enterprise Networking Planet, this move embodies Cole’s belief that networking infrastructure development is increasingly being driven by Big Data applications. He cites the key challenge as not finding somewhere to store all the data (e.g. storage) but rather how to make it available to “diverse and disparate sets of resources quickly and at a relatively low cost.”

He closes out with his piece by admitting that there’s still progress to be made with this technology. Nevertheless, we’re proud to be leading the charge.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Enjoy!

 

InformationAge: Converged infrastructure: a networking panacea or just another nice idea?

By Ben Rossi

It’s a real-time, data-heavy, multimedia world. Legacy networks with their siloed environments are simply not designed to deliver today’s enterprise demands, which are focused more and more on delivering applications Continue reading

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Does Infinite Bandwidth Mean You Don’t Need SDN?

Interestingly, this question was asked during a discussion I had at the Open Server Summit last November with an Industry Analyst with, and

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Musing: Could We Replace PCIe Bus With Ethernet Switch ?

I've been thinking about how a data centre architecture would look if we replaced the PCIe bus in servers with an Ethernet fabric. It's more doable than most people think.

The post Musing: Could We Replace PCIe Bus With Ethernet Switch ? appeared first on EtherealMind.

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Forming a Local User Group

I just read a short post by Lindsay Hill titled Doing Community Programs Right. I think the points made are accurate and well-founded. Prior to working for Cisco, I was part of the “CLN Designated VIP Program”. I had the opportunity to connect with others in and around the industry. I think these online communities are great and there is a wealth of knowledge sharing that happens. During key conferences many of our paths cross and even more interesting conversations happen.

I’d personally like to bring some of those concepts into the local communities I work in. I think many of the same tenants would be important. I wouldn’t want a local group to be about any single vendor (even Cisco) or partner. It would be really interesting to just get a bunch of people together that wanted to share their technology challenges and how they are addressing them.

If you have started such a group, I’d love to hear what worked and what didn’t. Were you able to get attendance even in smaller or rural communities? Maybe you are located in Central Kentucky or East Tennessee and would like to work together in such an effort? If so, reach out to Continue reading

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Going Over the Edge with your VMware NSX and Cisco Nexus

What could possibly be more fun than connecting your awesome new NSX gear to your Cisco Nexus gear? For the life of me I really don’t know. All right then. Lets do it!

Lets kick things off with this email question I received from a reader.

Hi Brad, In our environment we have two prevailing server standards, rackmounts and UCS. I read your excellent NSX on UCS and 7K design guide and the section on not running routing protocols over the VPC links makes sense. My related question concerns how we can achieve a routing adjacency from the NSX Distributed Router to the N7K with a rack mount with 2x10gbe interfaces connecting to 2x7Ks via VPC? (we don’t use the NSX Edge Router).

This reader has politely pointed out that my VMware NSX on Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000 design guide could have provided a bit more detail on NSX Edge design. I totally agree. There’s no time like the present, so let’s dive into that now and stir up some content that might end up in the next version of the guide.

All right. We won’t worry too much about the form factor of the servers right now. Whether Continue reading

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Going Over the Edge with your VMware NSX and Cisco Nexus

Hey! Cisco Nexus peeps! What could possibly be more fun than connecting your awesome new NSX gear to your Cisco Nexus gear? For the life of me I really don’t know. All right then. Lets do it!

Lets kick things off with this email question I received from a reader.

Hi Brad, In our environment we have two prevailing server standards, rackmounts and UCS. I read your excellent NSX on UCS and 7K design guide and the section on not running routing protocols over the VPC links makes sense. My related question concerns how we can achieve a routing adjacency from the NSX Distributed Router to the N7K with a rack mount with 2x10gbe interfaces connecting to 2x7Ks via VPC? (we don’t use the NSX Edge Router).

This reader has politely pointed out that my VMware NSX on Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000 design guide could have provided a bit more detail on NSX Edge design. I totally agree. There’s no time like the present, so let’s dive into that now and stir up some content that might end up in the next version of the guide.

All right. We won’t worry too much about the form factor of the Continue reading

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Going Over the Edge with your VMware NSX and Cisco Nexus

Hey! Cisco Nexus peeps! What could possibly be more fun than connecting your awesome new NSX gear to your Cisco Nexus gear? For the life of me I really don’t know. All right then. Lets do it!

Lets kick things off with this email question I received from a reader.

Hi Brad, In our environment we have two prevailing server standards, rackmounts and UCS. I read your excellent NSX on UCS and 7K design guide and the section on not running routing protocols over the VPC links makes sense. My related question concerns how we can achieve a routing adjacency from the NSX Distributed Router to the N7K with a rack mount with 2x10gbe interfaces connecting to 2x7Ks via VPC? (we don’t use the NSX Edge Router).

This reader has politely pointed out that my VMware NSX on Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000 design guide could have provided a bit more detail on NSX Edge design. I totally agree. There’s no time like the present, so let’s dive into that now and stir up some content that might end up in the next version of the guide.

All right. We won’t worry too much about the form factor of the Continue reading

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Going Over the Edge with your VMware NSX and Cisco Nexus

Hey! Cisco Nexus peeps! What could possibly be more fun than connecting your awesome new NSX gear to your Cisco Nexus gear? For the life of me I really don’t know.  All right then. Lets do it! Lets kick things off with this email question I received from a reader. “Hi Brad, In our environment […]

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Brocade acquires Riverbed ADC to bolster virtual delivery services

Brocade this week said it will acquire Riverbed Technology's SteelApp product line in an all-cash asset transaction. Terms were not disclosed. SteelApp is a virtual application delivery controller (ADC) for enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications. The SteelApp product line controls traffic to and from applications to improve application delivery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Whiteboarding Cisco ACI on Software Gone Wild

Late last year David Gee and I wanted to test another interesting gizmo: an online virtual whiteboard. David was pondering some interesting aspect of Cisco ACI and they seemed like a perfect topic for an impromptu discussion.

Read more ...

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Doing Community Programs Right

You know I’m not the biggest fan of vendor clubs (or influencer marketing programs, call them what you like). But if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. Don’t let it just become a ‘free T-shirt club':

If you're building the community program – ensure it scales so it doesn't end up being a free tshirt club.Connecting and Knowledge xfer=must

— Anthony Burke (@pandom_) February 5, 2015

@pandom is spot-on. The ideal community program should not just be a method to blast out press releases, or give out a few free shirts in the hope of currying favour. The program manager has taken care to select people who are positive about the company, share with the community and have opinions about where the vendor is going.

That is a valuable resource that should not be wasted. A good program should seek to engage in a two-way dialogue. Not just pushing out info, but seeking feedback on what’s working, and what’s not. Don’t just push out a few early release notices – have honest discussions about roadmaps, plans, etc. Help your members connect with each other – who knows what benefit that might lead to in future?

FWIW, I’m Continue reading

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Verdict’s In, Size Does Matter…

I just wanted to take a moment and make a new podcast recommendation. This recommendation is the handiwork of several of our industry friends. The premise is around the unique use of technologies by small and medium business. This podcast should server as a good listen for everyone interested in SMB tech!

• [SIZE MATTERS]

The post Verdict’s In, Size Does Matter… appeared first on PacketU.

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Cloud analytics

Librato is an example of a cloud based analytics service (now part of SolarWinds). Librato provides an easy to use REST API for pushing metrics into their cloud service. The web portal makes it simple to combine and trend data and build and share dashboards.

This article describes a proof of concept demonstrating how Librato's cloud service can be used to cost effectively monitor large scale cloud infrastructure by leveraging standard sFlow instrumentation. Librato offers a free 30 day trial, making it easy to evaluate solutions based on this demonstration.
The diagram shows the measurement pipeline. Standard sFlow measurements from hosts, hypervisors, virtual machines, containers, load balancers, web servers and network switches stream to the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine. Metrics are pushed from sFlow-RT to Librato using the REST API.

Over 40 vendors implement the sFlow standard and compatible products are listed on sFlow.org. The open source Host sFlow agent exports standard sFlow metrics from hosts. For additional background, the Velocity conference talk provides an introduction to sFlow and case study from a large social networking site.


Librato's service is priced based on the number of data points that they need to store. For example, a Host sFlow agent Continue reading

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CCDE Training

I am very pleased to announce that my student Hamed Zolghadri passed the CCDE Practical exam in February, and now he has joined the CCDE club

The post CCDE Training appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

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The F-Script – Now on GitHub

A while back I posted about my “f-script”, a tool that reads device configurations and extracts IP/subnet information so that it can quickly and easily queried to find where an IP might exist on the network, and what else is on the same subnet.

I was also lucky enough to take part in an early episode of Ivan Pepelnjak’s “Software Gone Wild” podcast where I talked about network automation and in particular, the f-script. In that podcast I promised that I would put the f-script up on GitHub once I had the time to clean it up a little and remove things that tied it to a particular environment.

At the end of 2014 I finally uploaded the scripts, and you are now in the lucky position of being able to laugh at how badly it’s written (and really, it is) or, better still, to help me improve it by submitting your own edits. Bear in mind that this started off as a hack (“I’ll do it like this just to prove that it can work”) and as with so many temporary solutions, ended up never being rewritten “properly”. Still, it works and has been pretty Continue reading