Cisco VIRL released into the wild

virlAfter much waiting from all of us, Cisco has released, on “cyber Monday” no less, VIRL. As you may remember, VIRL was the talk of CLUS 2013, and many of us have been eagerly waiting for this tool ever since. For those of you out of the loop, VIRL enabled users to rapidly design, configure and simulate Cisco network topologies. With this we can run IOSv (IOS Virtual) IOS XRv, CSR1000v (Which runs IOS-XE), and NX-OSv (ala the previously leaked Titanium). The cool factor really starts to come into play when you look at how fast you can deploy the base network configurations. Cisco has leveraged OpenStack, KVM, and AutoNetkit along with their VM Maestro GUI to allow you to quickly create network topologies, and have the base configurations built automagically. The downside is we are missing some features that some of us are rather used to including, Serial interfaces, Cisco ASA, and L2 Support. Hopefully these will arrive in the future, although I’ve heard no rumors of such as of yet….

Pricing is done in two tiers, both of which are annual subscriptions. The personal edition is $199.99/year (But you can save $50 currently by using the virl50 Continue reading

How to install Mininet 2.2 beta

Most people who use the Mininet network simulator will download and set up the Mininet virtual machine image. However, there are times when we may want to use a different version of Mininet than the one already installed in the Mininet VM.

For example, we may want to use the newest features of Mininet currently being developed. The Mininet project releases beta-quality source code that user can download and install themselves.

This post will show how to install Mininet 2.2 Beta on a virtual machine image running Ubuntu Server. The steps described below should work for any version of Mininet that the user wants to install.

Do not install Mininet on your host computer

Warning: Do not install Mininet on your host computer. Install in in a virtual machine.

The Mininet install script may overwrite files in your home directory (depending on what you already have installed)1. If Mininet makes changes that cause problems on an existing virtual machine, you can just delete the VM and try again with a fresh Ubuntu Server image. But, if you install Mininet directly on your host computer you may cause problems.

In my own experience, I tried installing Mininet on my Continue reading

Is the Facebook DC Architecture right for you?

A few weeks ago Facebook announced their new datacenter architecture in a post on their network engineering blog. Facebook is one of the few large web scale companies that is fairly open about their network architecture and designs and it gives many others the opportunity to see how a network can be scaled, even though the scale is well beyond what most will need in the foreseeable future, if not forever.

In the post, Alexey walks through some of the thought process behind the architecture, which is ultimately the most important part of any architecture and design. Too often we simply build whatever seems to be popular or common, or mandated/pushed by a specific vendor. The network however is a product, a deliverable, and has requirements like just about anything else we produce.

Facebook’s and the other web properties’ scale is at a different order of magnitude from most everyone else, but their requirements should sound pretty familiar to many:

  • Intra DC traffic is significantly higher than inter DC or DC to Internet traffic
    • “machine to machine traffic – is several orders of magnitude larger than what goes out to the Internet”
  • Build for growth, the network is not a Continue reading

NG mVPN-Control Plane Overview

In this post we will be exploring the shortcomings of MVPN (Draft Rosen/RFC 6037), with a focus on how NG-MVPN technologies address these limitations. Why NG-MVPN? The base specification for BGP/MPLS VPNs, RFC4364, only addresses unicast, and the first proposal for multicast support in BGP/MPLS VPNs is often known as Draft Rosen (which is now […]

Author information

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh,(3xCCIE,CCDE) is a Sr. Engineer mostly focused on service providers , data center and security. He is a network enthusiast passionate about network technologies so not only is it his profession, but something of a hobby as well.
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The post NG mVPN-Control Plane Overview appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.

OSPF Default-Information Originate – Built-in Loop Prevention with ALWAYS keyword

This post represents the solution and explanation for quiz-24. Quiz Review Quiz #24 opens the discussion about a scenario in which traffic is black-holed when a certain link fails. Let’s summarize the quiz: company ABC runs OSPF internally, in all 3 buildings internet access is provided via 2 Border Routers (BR-B and BR-C) each connected to a separate ISP each BR receives a default route from its directly connected ISP... [read more]

Establish Static Redundancy via DSL Connection

It is a popular method for small businesses to utilize their local ISP’s business class DSL service. It is a also a great rule of thumb to multi-home your connection by using 2 separate ISP’s (Cox and Verizon for example). You would ideally want to either load balance your traffic between the 2 connections or […]

Author information

Korey

Korey

Korey is a Network Engineer and Military veteran with over 8 years of experience in the IT industry. Currently holds the following certifications; CCNP R&S, JNCIA, and CCNA Security. He is interested in advancing his network knowledge and teaching others. Currently works as a Network Engineer and is responsible for day to day operations as well as network design and implementation.
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The post Establish Static Redundancy via DSL Connection appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Korey.

Netflix is using obfuscation to not pay their fair share!

Netflix is using obfuscation to not pay their fair share!

by Scott Sherwood, CEO - December 2, 2014

As a CEO of a company, I would love to have someone subsidize my business and reduce my costs to deliver products to my customers. Yet for-profit company Netflix, which uses more Internet bandwidth than anyone in the world, wants network providers to connect them up for free. Yes, for free. They are using terms such as “Network Neutrality” to make the large telecom providers seem like bad guys, while creating confusion to hide behind their greed. For Netflix, delivery of content is like a cost of goods sold, but they just don’t want to pay their fair share.  

In his in-depth article last week for Forbes – How Netflix Poisoned The Net Neutrality Debate – author Larry Downes traces the origins of today’s fight over network neutrality back to March of this year. He references a blog post by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings that “…urged the FCC to redefine net neutrality, transforming it from a set of last-mile consumer protections to detailed government control of connections at the Internet’s back-end. Rather than pay the transit providers, Netflix wanted to connect directly Continue reading

30 Blogs in 30 Days – Lessons Learned

Challenge Accepted!So with some triumph and minor exhaustion, I completed Etherealmind’s 30 Blogs in 30 Days challenge; but so what? Does it change anything? Do I get a prize?

Here’s what I learned.

30 Blogs in 30 Days

As a reminder, I started this challenge on October 16 and posted every day from then until November 16 (actually just over 30 days, but who is counting). I found the process quite interesting, so I decided to share a few things that struck me along the way.

Write It Down

It sounds obvious, but if you’re a blogger, how many times have you thought to yourself “Oooh, such and such would make a good blog post,” then when you have a chance to write some content you go blank on what this great topic was? I have this happen a lot. Trying to create one blog post a day meant that forgetting posts topics was not a luxury I could afford to have if I wanted to avoid staring at my screen for hours. I had to start keeping a Notes file open on my phone, occasionally took an audio note, and kept an iCloud-synced “Ideas for Blog” file in MultiMarkdown Composer. I found Continue reading

HP Networking – Hitting The Right Notes

HP has quietly been making waves recently with their networking strategies.  They recently showed off their technology around software defined networking (SDN) applications at Interop New York.  Here’s a video:

It would seem that HP has been doing a lot of hard work on the back end with SDN.  So why haven’t we heard about it?

Trumpet and Bugle

HP Networking hasn’t been in the news as much as Cisco and VMware as of late.  When you consider that both of those companies are pushing agendas related to redefining the paradigm of networking around policy and virtualization their trumpeting of those agendas makes total sense.  But even members of the League of Non-Aligned Vendors like Brocade are talking a lot about their SDN strategy with the Vyatta Controller and OpenStack integrations.  Vendors have layers and layers of plans for the “new” networking.  But HP has actually been doing it!  Why haven’t we known until now?

HP has been content to play the role of the bugler to the trumpeters of the bigger organizations.  Rather than talking over and over again about what they are planning on doing, HP waits until they’ve actually done it to talk Continue reading

December CCIE Scholarship Winners

iPexpert’s 2014 Scholarship :: December 1st Winners

in December 2013, we announced our 2014 Scholarship Program / CCIE Lab Training Giveaway.

For the entire year of 2014, we gave giving away 60 free Online-HD-ILT Bootcamp seats, and CCIE Lab Self-Study Training Bundles spanning across every CCIE track we teach (R&S, Collaboration, Data Center, Wireless and Security). This concludes our 2014 CCIE Scholarship Giveaway.

The December 2014 winners of a free 5-Day Online-HD-ILT Bootcamp seat:

  • R&S: @rperezdea
  • Collaboration: @Hussein_A_Emam
  • Data Center: @DavidSudjiman
  • Wireless: wifihero
  • Security: @eibanas

The December 2014 winners of a free Lab Essentials HD VOD and Workbook(s) Bundle:

  • R&S: Gusdsalazar
  • Collaboration: @Renilfo
  • Data Center:@Bash_Mac
  • Wireless: macdadwire
  • Security: @AndreAubet

This winners must contact [email protected] with your name / contact information to receive your freebies! Thank you for entering, and congratulations to our December winners.   

 

Cisco VIRL is finally out

How does Internet work - We know what is networking

Cisco finally released long-awaited personal network simulator VIRL. VIRL is a simulator like Cisco CML – Cisco Modelling Lab released few moths ago which is made available for business network simulations and testing in engineering normal day job. With VIRL we got a personal version of CML with drastically lower price tag aimed to help students preparing for Cisco CCNP and more than that for those preparing CCIE lab exam. VIRL will surely help the engineers managing small business network to proof their configuration change before applying it to real network. This solution give us a more stable and “official” GNS3 which will save

Cisco VIRL is finally out

Open vSwitch 2014 Fall Conference


Open vSwitch is an open source software virtual switch that is popular in cloud environments such as OpenStack. Open vSwitch is a standard Linux component that forms the basis of a number of commercial and open source solutions for network virtualization, tenant isolation, and network function virtualization (NFV) - implementing distributed virtual firewalls and routers.

The recent Open vSwitch 2014 Fall Conference agenda included a wide variety speakers addressing a range of topics, including: large scale operation experiences at Rackspace, implementing stateful firewalls, Docker networking,  and acceleration technologies (Intel DPDK and Netmap/VALE).

The video above is a recording of the following sFlow related talk from the conference:
Traffic visibility and control with sFlow (Peter Phaal, InMon)
sFlow instrumentation has been included in Open vSwitch since version 0.99.1 (released 25 Jan 2010). This talk will introduce the sFlow architecture and discuss how it differs from NetFlow/IPFIX, particularly in regards to delivering real-time flow analytics to an SDN controller. The talk will demonstrate that sFlow measurements from Open vSwitch are identical to sFlow measurements made in hardware on bare metal switches, providing unified, end-to-end, measurement across physical and virtual networks. Finally, Open vSwitch / Mininet will be used to demonstrate Continue reading

The 6 Requirements for Data Center Networks

One way or another, all data center networks exhibit at least 6 different functional areas that their operators need to engineer, implement, and operate with a differing set of needs and requirements. Similarly, in one way or another, most of the available SDN and virtualized network solutions available today or in progress aim to deal with issues in one or more of these areas to improve their functional effectiveness, cost, automated-ness, or integrated-ness. Yet some areas receive an inordinate amount of focus/attention and those areas may not necessarily have the most opportunity for improvement. Let’s take a look at these 6 requirements in order of the opportunity value to bring new levels of effectiveness to data centers.

1) Edge Switching (inter-server or more generically, inter-end point):

Edge switching loosely covers the function of providing switching between end points, whether they be virtual servers, physical servers, storage devices, or terminating services devices (load balancers, firewalls, etc.) It is important to note that in a virtualized server environment, there is typically 2 layers of edge – a set of virtual switches that connect together VMs and a set of physical switches that connect the physical hosts.

Much of the attention and Continue reading

Show 214 – Storage versus Networking

The eternal loathing between Storage and Networking professionals has manifested into a podcast when I am joined by well known storage people to debate our dysfunctional family relationship.

Author information

Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

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The post Show 214 – Storage versus Networking appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Response: Docker Networking | Chris Swan’s Weblog

I’ve spent some hours taking a look at Docker containers and how they connect to the network. The short summary is “messy” and better description is “train wreck”. Chris Swan has a 30 minute presentation on his experiences with Docker as part of his company VNS3. Docker Networking | Chris Swan’s Weblog. At this point […]


The post Response: Docker Networking | Chris Swan’s Weblog appeared first on EtherealMind.

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