VMware NSX Customer Story: Colt Decreases Data Center Networking Complexity
Adoption of network virtualization and SDN technologies from VMware and Arista Networks simplifies cloud infrastructure and enables automation to reduce timescales of cloud and network service provisioning
Offering the largest enterprise-class cloud footprint in Europe, Colt, an established leader in delivering integrated network, data center, voice and IT services, has implemented software- defined networking [SDN] and network virtualization to simplify how its managed IT and cloud-based networking environment is deployed, managed and scaled throughout its data centers.
Following an extensive review, Colt selected Arista to provide high speed 10 and 40 gigabit Ethernet cloud-centric switches as an underlay network fabric and VMware NSX™ network virtualization to deliver a fully decoupled software network overlay.
SDN paves the way for automated cloud service delivery
The shift to SDN will provide a flexible, scalable, efficient and cost effective way to support the delivery of Colt’s managed IT services, including cloud based services. This makes Colt one of the first service providers in Europe to adopt SDN in a production environment to remove automate cloud service delivery.
As a result of deploying a new network architecture based on Arista and VMware networking technologies, the time for Colt to add, change or modify services will Continue reading
Using LISP for IPv6 tunnelling.
In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network.
LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity. This means it can be used for such cool things as mobility, being VM’s or a mobile data connection.
However another aspect of using LISP involves its tunneling mechanism. This is what I will be using in my example to provide the IPv6 islands the ability to communicate over the IPv4-only backbone.
There is alot of terminology involved with LISP, but i will only use some of them here for clarity. If you want to know more about LISP, a good place to start is http://lisp.cisco.com.
The topology i will be using is a modified version of one presented in a Cisco Live presentation called “BRKRST-3046 – Advanced LISP – Whats in it for me?”. I encourage you to view this as well for more information.
Here is the topology:
Some background information about the setup. Both Site 1 and Site 2 are using EIGRP as the IGP. Both IPv4 and Continue reading
VMworld sessions up for viewing. It’s free to!
How’s that for a topic out of left field, never before seen on my blog. VMWare! Well, I got wind that WMworld sessions are available to watch for free so I just wanted to spread the word. All you need to do is create an account, you can find the sessions here. I’ll say It’s nice […]
HP NNMi 10.00 Released
HP NNMi version 10.0 has been released. This is a good release, with many usability enhancements. I’m pleased to see continued development, as the future nirvana of all-powerful software defined networks hasn’t quite arrived yet. For now, we still have to manage our networks the old-fashioned way: SNMP is still alive & kicking.
NNMi – Background
HP NNMi is a spiritual descendant of HP OpenView, one of the first network monitoring tools. Between versions 6 and 7, HP completely re-wrote the NNM code, and now we have NNMi. The core product performs network discovery and fault monitoring. Add-on components (iSPIs) offer performance monitoring, NetFlow analysis, IP SLA monitoring, etc. A sister-product (HP Network Automation) is used for network configuration management. The add-on components were all separately licensed, but HP now bundles products together.
Historically NNMi has focused on underlying network monitoring capabilities, and less on the user interface. This meant that almost anything was technically possible, but the visual experience was underwhelming. The integration between core product and add-on components was limited.
The last major release was 9.20, in June 2012. There have been minor enhancements and fixes since, but the last patch was in September 2013. We’ve been due for Continue reading
Network Dictionary – Default Free Zone
Define "Default Free Zone" or DFZ Routing
The post Network Dictionary – Default Free Zone appeared first on EtherealMind.
Why logging is so important? VSS example.
Example: Why switch in VSS mode crashed? Few weeks ago there was a great podcast about logging (show 192). Recently I came with great example about how important logging is. If there is only one thing that I could pick up from the podcast it would be following statement “log as much as you can, […]
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The post Why logging is so important? VSS example. appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Michał Janowski.
What is Service Chaining?
This post is in response to a comment on one of my previous posts on using MPLS in the Data Center. Service chaining has been getting a lot of press — and I’m encountering it a lot in the customers I’m talking to. What’s the big deal? To understand service chaining, let’s look at a […]
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OSPF Enhancements in recent IOS versions
OSPFv3 Authentication Trailer In 2011 I wrote an article showing that in order to provide authenticated OSPFv3 neighbour sessions, you needed the security license on IOS. Manav Bhatia commented on that post stating they were working on an IETF standard to fix this. That draft became RFC6506 and then RFC7166 Cisco has added support for […]OpenStack taining
There are two buzzwords floating around. Cloud and SDN.They are even closely related.
For now, SDN is mostly a buzzword but Cloud is actually something people are using daily, such as AWS, Azure, Rackspace, Google and others.
As network engineer, my chances of touching or even seeing the details of the backends of those public clouds are quit small. However, private clouds are different.
With private clouds, as it was with VMWare installations, network engineers are expected to be able to support and install the network side of things.
So I have decided to jump in and learn private clouds. And for me, the best way to learn is always hands on.
OpenStack has these online training guides: http://docs.openstack.org/training-guides/content/
I'll jump right in and do the Operator Training Guide.
I'll publish a series of posts with my experience with the training material, and I'll update this post with links to all of the posts.
Blog status report 2014
The occasion of my fiftieth post is a good milestone to pause and look back on the two years since I started blogging about open-source routing and network simulation. I will review the blog’s performance statistics and reflect on why I started this blog and what I want to do next.
The chart above shows the blog traffic over the past two years, starting in August 2012. In the first year I thought I would reach only a small audience but, as I posted more content, more users found my blog. In the past twelve months, 29,500 unique users visited this blog. Traffic grew steadily almost every month in the past year.
Users from almost every country on Earth have visited this blog. The map below illustrates the number of users in each country who have visited the blog during the past twelve months, with shades of blue representing the number of users.
I considered writing a technical blog after listening to the audiobook Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuck, read by the author. The audiobook was very inspirational and made me understand that writing a blog could be a positive experience.
The next book I read was Technical Blogging Continue reading
Joining the Cisco Team
Today was a bittersweet day for me. It was my final day working with a great group of people at a prominent community bank. I have nothing but good things to say about the people, the organization, and the interesting projects I’ve been involved in. I’ll miss everyone a lot and plan to stay in touch.
Tomorrow I begin a new role as a Systems Engineer at Cisco Systems. I will be working with the SLED (public sector) sales team in Kentucky and West Virginia. In this role I hope to broaden my knowledge of networking components and spend time helping customers better position their technology infrastructures.
What this means for me–
I will be aggressively learning the Cisco Product lines, including areas that I previously had less exposure to. I will take advantage of the resources I have and marry my vision of the changing network industry to the components Cisco positions into higher education environments. My intentions include better understanding the roadmap and technical details as they pertain to the integration path from traditional networking to software defined approaches.
But what about…
As long time PacketU readers know, I have written positive and negative articles about many vendors. All vendors have their strengths and weaknesses. We regularly see them Continue reading
How I Passed the CCIE Collaboration Lab Exam
Having passed the CCIE Voice 10 years ago, and having taught on the technologies surrounding both Voice and Collaboration ever since, one might think that the exam would be easy to pass. I can assure you that no matter how much you know, no CCIE exam is easy to pass. Cisco doesn’t allow them to be. Every CCIE track requires hard work and preparation, even if it may, at first glance, seem somewhat of a repeat of things you already know. You may ask since I had the CCIE Voice already, why I didn’t simply take the Collaboration Written exam and convert my cert to a CCIE Collaboration? The answer I think is pretty straightforward – it’s the challenge!! Seeing if you still have it 10 years later. Seeing if what you’ve been teaching your students for 10 years is still up to par and still relevant. To take you back to when I passed CCIE Voice ten years ago, the track was literally brand new that year, and Cisco was testing on CallManager version 3.3, SIP wasn’t anywhere to be found, and creating a hunt group meant tweaking Attendant Console to make it do things it shouldn’t ever Continue reading
Juniper Password Recovery
I recently purchased a Juniper J2320 from eBay for a fair price. I know it is an older router, but it has the features I need in order to test and write a few things. When I received the router it was not sent with a wiped config, so I was unable to log into […]Announcing the Network Break Podcast
Announcing the Network Break podcast - a regular look at the news in networking and cloud infrastructure in less than 30 minutes.
The post Announcing the Network Break Podcast appeared first on EtherealMind.
Network Break 14
The Network Break isn't broken and returns for another week with a closer look at the news.
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The post Network Break 14 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
New Feature in Cumulus Linux 2.2: sFlow
sFlow is an open protocol, newly supported in Cumulus Linux 2.2, that enables a collector to determine what is going on in a complex network.
It is used to collect statistics, such as packet counts, error counts, CPU usage, etc from a large number of individual switches. What is especially interesting is that it can be used to collect sampled packets (usually only the first n bytes, containing the header), along with some metadata about those packets.
Bringing sFlow to Cumulus Linux was particuarly easy, because “hsflowd” was already available for implementing sFlow support on Linux servers. We were able to reuse that existing code, with extremely minimal modification, to implement sFlow on our Linux based switches.
sFlow allows a collector to get a statistical view of what is going on in a collection of switches, approaching per-flow granularity. This is extremely useful information to present to users for capacity planning and debugging purposes, but things really get interesting when the collector can make decisions based on the information.
For example, our friends at inMon implemented detection of elephant flows (high bandwidth), followed by marking those flows on the switch at network ingress for special QoS handling. This nearly Continue reading
More DHCP Snooping
This post is a follow up to Ethan’s post and Edward’s post. Both were very useful to me as I began to plan rolling out this feature. I wanted to verify something TimA said in the comments at the bottom of Ethan’s post, namely that a switch running DHCP Snooping will drop DHCP Discovers from […]
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The post More DHCP Snooping appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Guy Morrell.
Install and configure vSphere Data Protection (VDP/VDPA)
The vSphere Data Protection appliance allows to backup virtual machines with a built-in tool instead of a third-party backup product. VDP is available on all vSphere editions but Essentials Kit. Moreover VDP can be extended to VDPA (vSphere Data Protection Advanced). Basically VDPA has the same features of VDP, except: VDPA has a per-CPU (socket) license, VDP […](Visited 251 times since 2013-06-04, 9 visits today)
SDN, APIs, and DevOps
There was a recent blog by Mark Burgess, founder and creator of CFEngine. It is a must read (on his personal blog). He really makes you think where we are as an industry, question if we are on the right path, and quite frankly calling out certain technologies as pity attempts compared to what is needed. Regardless of all that, we cannot forget one key point, the industry is in fact moving forward right now.
As I read his post, I remembered a conversation that I saw on twitter not too long between John Willis, Lori MacVittie, and Joe Onisick. It was more or less on the intersection of SDN and DevOps.
The article by Burgess and the Twitter conversation really got me thinking.
When you combine these interactions, even at the highest levels, you have to wonder, what is the right approach from both a vendor (product) and user standpoint? Are we on the right path? Do we have it all wrong? Must we fail first before getting it right?
SDN Will Simplify
SDN controllers will totally simplify things, but even then, the APIs they expose are arguably too low level for the average consumer of Continue reading
The article by Burgess and the Twitter conversation really got me thinking.
When you combine these interactions, even at the highest levels, you have to wonder, what is the right approach from both a vendor (product) and user standpoint? Are we on the right path? Do we have it all wrong? Must we fail first before getting it right?
SDN Will Simplify
SDN controllers will totally simplify things, but even then, the APIs they expose are arguably too low level for the average consumer of Continue reading