FEMA and Your Business Continuity Plan

I passed the ROUTE exam a few days/weeks/months/something ago and decided to pursue certifications of another sort for a while. The wife and I are trying our best to help the community through our ham radio training, so I decided to go down that path a bit further. One thing I was interested in doing is to do EmComm during declared emergencies. That meant I had to take two FEMA courses online to be allowed in the EOC. I thought they would be terribly boring, but I found them to be quite familiar.

The first course was on the Incident Command System (ICS). The main idea is that, in the event of an emergency of any kind or size, an Incident Commander (IC) is assigned to be responsible for the recovery effort.  This mean analysis of the incident, generating an action plan (a very key component), and execution of said plan. If the IC can complete the action plan by himself, then off he goes. If he or she needs some additional resources like people or equipment, then he or she is empowered to draft that help from any entity that’s involved.

Another one of the big points of ICS is Continue reading

A Quick Introduction to Vagrant

This post will provide a quick introduction to a tool called Vagrant. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock—or, more likely, been too busy doing real work in your data center to pay attention—you’ve probably heard of Vagrant. Maybe, like me, you had some ideas about what Vagrant is (or isn’t) and what it does (or doesn’t) do. Hopefully I can clear up some of the confusion in this post.

In its simplest form, Vagrant is an automation tool with a domain-specific language (DSL) that is used to automate the creation of VMs and VM environments. The idea is that a user can create a set of instructions, using Vagrant’s DSL, that will set up one or more VMs and possibly configure those VMs. Every time the user uses the precreated set of instructions, the end result will look exactly the same. This can be beneficial for a number of use cases, including developers who want a consistent development environment or folks wanting to share a demo environment with other users.

Vagrant makes this work by using a number of different components:

• Providers: These are the “back end” of Vagrant. Vagrant itself doesn’t provide any virtualization functionality; it relies on Continue reading

Tech Talks: The Essence of MPLS

Seamus Gilchrist sent me a fantastic list of MPLS- and MPLS-TE-related questions. Instead of starting an email exchange we agreed on something that should benefit a wider community: a lengthy whiteboard session discussing the basics of MPLS, MPLS-TE, load balancing and QoS in MPLS networks…

The first part of our conversation is already online: The Essence of MPLS.

HP proposes hybrid OpenFlow discussion at Open Daylight design forum

We would like to share our experiences with Customer SDN deployments that require OpenFlow hybrid mode. Why it matters, implementation considerations, and how to achieve better support for it in ODL

OpenFlow-compliant switches come in two types: OpenFlow-only, and OpenFlow-hybrid. OpenFlow-only switches support only OpenFlow operation, in those switches all packets are processed by the OpenFlow pipeline, and cannot be processed otherwise. OpenFlow-hybrid switches support both OpenFlow operation and normal Ethernet switching operation, i.e. traditional L2 Ethernet switching, VLAN isolation, L3 routing (IPv4 routing, IPv6 routing...), ACL and QoS processing

The rationale for supporting hybrid mode is twofold:

1. Controlled switches have decades of embedded traditional networking logic. The controller does not add value to a solution if it replicates traditional forwarding logic. One alternative controller responsibility is that provides forwarding decisions when it wants to override the traditional data-plane forwarding decision.
2. Controllers can be gradually incorporated into a traditional network. Continue reading

Rebuttal to Volokh’s CyberVor post

IDF 2014: Architecting for SDI, a Microserver Perspective

This is a liveblog for session DATS013, on microservers. I was running late to this session (my calendar must have been off—thought I had 15 minutes more), so I wasn’t able to capture the titles or names of the speakers.

The first speaker starts out with a review of exactly what a microserver is; Intel sees microservers as a natural evolution from rack-mounted servers to blades to microservers. Key microserver technologies include: Intel Atom C2000 family of processors; Intel Xeon E5 v2 processor family; and Intel Ethernet Switch FM6000 series. Microservers share some common characteristics, such as high integrated platforms (like integrated network) and being designed for high efficiency. Efficiency might be more important than absolute performance.

Disaggregation of resources is a common platform option for microservers. (Once again this comes back to Intel’s rack-scale architecture work.) This leads the speaker to talk about a Technology Delivery Vehicle (TDV) being displayed here at the show; this is essentially a proof-of-concept product that Intel built that incorporates various microserver technologies and design patterns.

Upcoming microserver technologies that Intel has announced or is working on incude:

• The Intel Xeon D, a Xeon-based SoC with integrated 10Gbs Ethernet and running in a Continue reading

Poster: State of SDN in 2014

The post Poster: State of SDN in 2014 appeared first on EtherealMind.

IDF 2014: Open Source Storage Optimizations

This is a liveblog of IDF 2014 session DATS009, titled “Ceph: Open Source Storage Software Optimizations on Intel Architecture for Cloud Workloads.” (That’s a mouthful.) The speaker is Anjaneya “Reddy” Chagam, a Principal Engineer in the Intel Data Center Group.

Chagam starts by reviewing the agenda, which—as the name of the session implies—is primarily focused on Ceph. He next transitions into a review of the problem with storage in data centers today; specifically, that storage needs “are growing at a rate unsustainable with today’s infrastructure and labor costs.” Another problem, according to Chagam, is that today’s workloads end up using the same sets of data but in very different ways, and those different ways of using the data have very different performance profiles. Other problems with the “traditional” way of doing storage is that storage processing performance doesn’t scale out with capacity, storage environments are growing increasingly complex (which in turn makes management harder).

Chagam does admit that not all workloads are suited for distributed storage solutions. If you need high availability and high performance (like for databases), then the traditional scale-up model might work better. For “cloud workloads” (no additional context/information provided to qualify what a Continue reading

Tools for Learning Python for Networkers

I’ve been slowly adding to my list of favorite tools and books for learning Python, and I came across a new one this week. So it seemed like a good time to hit the highlights in a blog post, given that so many networkers have some motivation to learn a programming language. Feel free to comment and add your favorite tools to the list!

Context: Networkers Learning a Language (Python)

First, let me throw in a quick paragraph for context. In this world of SDN, NFV, and network automation and programmability, networking people may or may not choose to go learn a programming language. (What are your plans?)

If you do choose to learn a language (as the poll results show so far at least), Python seems to be the best choice if programming is either new to you, or you just haven’t had to (gotten to?) program as a regular part of a job. Python is the simplest to learn of the languages that matter most to SDN, and is becoming the language-of-choice for more and more universities as the first language learned by undergrads.

On to the Continue reading

Troubleshooting an ESXi host using esxtop

Provisioning an Autoscaling Infrastructure using Ansible

About Autoscaling

The concepts behind Amazon's Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) are very promising. Who wouldn't want to have their infrastructure scale automatically with increases and decreases of demand?  Plenty of folks are using ASGs to do that today. ASGs do bring about their own challenges, which this series of blog posts will show solutions to by taking advantage of features in Ansible and Ansible Tower.

IDF 2014 Day 2 Recap

Following on from my IDF 2014 Day 1 recap, here’s a quick recap of day 2.

Data Center Mega-Session

You can read the liveblog here if you want all the gory details. If we boil it down to the essentials, it’s actually pretty simple. First, deliver more computing power in the hardware, either through the addition of FPGAs to existing CPUs or through the continued march of CPU power (via more cores or faster clock speeds or both). Second, make the hardware programmable, through standard interfaces. Third, expand the use of “big data” and analytics.

Technical Sessions

I attended a couple technical sessions today, but didn’t manage to get any of them liveblogged. Sorry! I did tweet a few things from the sessions, in case you follow me on Twitter.

Expo Floor

I did have an extremely productive conversation regarding Intel’s rack-scale architecture (RSA) efforts. I pushed the Intel folks on the show floor to really dive into what makes up RSA, and finally got some answers that I’ll share in a separate post. I will do my best to get a dedicated RSA piece published just as soon as I possibly can.

Also on the expo floor, I Continue reading

Open-Source Hybrid Cloud Reference Architecture on Software Gone Wild

A while ago Rick Parker told me about his amazing project: he started a meetup group that will build a reference private/hybrid cloud heavily relying on virtualized network services, and publish all documentation related to their effort, from high-level architecture to device and software configurations, and wiring plans.

In Episode 8 of Software Gone Wild Rick told us more about his project, and we simply couldn’t avoid a long list of topics including:

Alteon AppShape++ Redirects

Lab goals

Setup

I'll use my Loadbalancer Lab Setup.

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10.136.6.11     3.dans-net.com
10.136.6.11     r.dans-net.com

Alteon configuration

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/c/slb/group g1
        ipver v4
        add 1
/c/slb/group g2
        ipver v4
        add 2
/c/slb/group g3
        ipver v4
        add 3

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 /c/slb/ Continue reading

DockerCon video: Docker deployments at New Relic

In this session, Paul Showalter & Karl Matthias from New Relic discuss how they succesfully leveraged Docker to have consistent, isolated, custom distributed environments over which they have centralized control; making their continuous deployment processes easy and scalable.

Learn More

• Read more about how New Relic used Docker to solve thorny deployments issues

Docker Events and Meetup

• View the list of upcoming events & meetup
• Find a Docker meetup group

Try Docker and stay up-to-date

• Sign up for a free Docker Hub account
• Try our online tutorial
• Sign up for Docker Weekly

IDF 2014: Data Center Mega-Session

This is a liveblog of the Data Center Mega-Session from day 2 of Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 in San Francisco.

Diane Bryant, SVP and GM of the Data Center Group takes the stage promptly at 9:30am to kick off the data center mega-session. Bryant starts the discussion by setting out the key drivers affecting the data center: new devices (and new volumes of devices) and new services (AWS, Netflix, Twitter, etc.). This is the “digital service economy,” and Bryant insists that today’s data centers aren’t prepared to handle the digital service economy.

Bryant posits that in the future (not-so-distant future):

• Systems will be workload optimized
• Infrastructure will be software defined
• Analytics will be pervasive

Per Bryant, when you’re operating at scale then efficiency matters, and that will lead organizations to choose platforms selected specifically for the workload. This leads to a discussion of customized offerings, and Bryant talks about an announcement earlier in the summer that combined a Xeon processor and a FPGA (field-programmable gate array) on the same die.

Bryant then introduces Karl Triebes, EVP and CTO of F5 Networks, who takes the stage to talk about FPGAs in F5 and how the joint Xeon/FPGA integrated solution Continue reading

AnsibleFest San Francisco Speakers

IDF 2014 Day 1 Recap

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 this week in San Francisco. Here’s a quick recap of day 1 (I should have published this last night—sorry for not getting it out sooner).

Day 1 Keynote

Here’s a liveblog of the IDF 2014 day 1 keynote.

The IDF keynotes are always a bit interesting for me. Intel has a very large consumer presence: PCs, ultrabooks, tablets, phones, 2-in–1/convertibles, all-in–1 devices. Naturally, this is a big part of the keynote. I don’t track or get involved in the consumer space; my focus is on the data center. It is kind of fun to see all the stuff going on in the consumer space, though. There were no major data center-centric announcements yesterday (day 1), but I suspect there will be some today (day 2) in a mega-session with Diane Bryant (SVP and GM of the Data Center Group at Intel). I’ll be liveblogging that mega-session, so stay tuned for details.

Technical Sessions

I was able to hit two technical sessions yesterday and liveblogged both of them:

• Virtualizing the Network to Enable a Software-Defined Infrastructure
• Bare Metal, Containers, and Virtualization: The Growing Choices for Cloud Applications

Both were Continue reading

IPv6 Neighbor Discovery (ND) and Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) Challenges

A few days ago Garrett Wollman published his exasperating experience running IPv6 on large L2 subnets with Juniper Ex4200 switches, concluding that “… much in IPv6 design and implementation has been botched by protocol designers and vendors …” (some of us would forcefully agree) making IPv6 “…simply unsafe to run on a production network…”

The resulting debate on Hacker News is quite interesting (and Andrew Yourtchenko is trying hard to keep it close to facts) and definitely worth reading… but is ND/MLD really as broken as some people claim it is?

Network Neutrality Is a Political, Not Technical, Problem

Network Neutrality is a Political, Not Technical, Problem

We've mentioned Network Neutrality several times before on the Knetwork Knowledge Blog, but I wanted to take another look at it since it's back in the news with Wednesday's planned protests by "BattleForTheNet.com" - an artificial "Internet Slowdown" that will create symbolic "loading" symbols and artificially slow down page loading. Participating websites include Kickstarter, Reddit, Foursquare, Vimeo, Namecheap, and others. 

Packet Design has differing opinions on the issue of network neutrality. This is a bit surprising when you consider network neutrality as a technical issue, because you would expect that the engineering and mathematics would speak for themselves. It should be relatively easy to prove, from a technological standpoint, whether a neutral or particular non-neutral Internet scheme would be "better." 

But the minute you ask "better for whom?" you start to realize that network neutrality is not a technical problem. It is a political problem that happens to involve technology. 

As our CTO Cengiz Alaettinoglu said in "Hot Potatoes and Network Neutrality," BGP and IGP routing delivers packets to the next autonomous system (AS) in the route Continue reading