FlipIT Cloud: Orchestrating IT-as-a-Service on Software Gone Wild

Imagine being an IT administrator running a multi-tenant enterprise environment (example: an SMB business center). How many things would you have to configure to add a new tenant? How about adding a new user for an existing tenant?

The engineers behind the scenes of FlipIT cloud service ended up with a 40-page configuration guide when they started the service years ago… and obviously decided full-blown automation is the only way to go.

Alteon – each server is different

Lab goal

Setup

I'll use my Loadbalancer Lab Setup.

Alteon configuration

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27

/c/slb/real r8080
       ena
       ipver v4
       rip 10.136.85.1
       addport 8080
/c/slb/real r8081
       ena
       ipver v4
       rip 10.136.85.2
       addport 8081
/c/slb/real r8082
       ena
       ipver v4
       rip 10.136.85.3
       addport 8082
/c/slb/group gMulti
       ipver v4
       add r8080
       add r8081
       add r8082
/c/slb/virt 6_16
       ena
       ipver v4
       vip 10.136.6.16                   
/c/slb/virt 6_16/service 80 http
       group gMulti
       rport 0       

• Lines 1-15 : Configure the real servers

• Notice the addport command, which sets the port being used by the server.

Storage Traffic Magic with OpenFlow

Storage Traffic Magic with OpenFlow

Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup

Using Puppet to Configure F5 Network’s LTM via SOAP

You’ll like this, and you won’t; and that reflects on how I’ve felt variously about this task/burden. So, I’ve spent three weeks, almost full-time, on the work necessary to use Puppet to configure F5 Networks LTM via SOAP. Not just a few Pools and Virtual Servers; the whole box, from scratch. I knew this would be […]

Author information

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 15 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books and is a regular contributor at DevCentral.

TwitterLinkedIn

The post Using Puppet to Configure F5 Network’s LTM via SOAP appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

APIs Alone Aren’t Enough

Yes, we know: Your product has an API. Yawn. Sorry for not getting excited. That’s just table stakes now. What I’m interested in is the pre-written integrations and code you have that does useful things with that API.

Because sure, an API lets me integrate my various systems however I want. Theoretically. Just the same way that Bunnings probably sells me all the pieces I need to build a complete house.

If I’m running a small company staffed by developers, then just giving me an API is acceptable. But in a larger company, or one without developer resources, an API alone isn’t enough. I want to see standard, obvious integrations already available, and supported by the vendor.

In this spirit, I’m very pleased to see that ThousandEyes now has a standard integration with PagerDuty:

ThousandEyes appears as a partner integration from which you can receive notifications; and, within ThousandEyes we now have a link to easily add alerts to your PagerDuty account.

You can read more at the ThousandEyes blog.

This is exactly the sort of obvious integration I Continue reading

Chinese Routing Errors Redirect Russian Traffic

In recent weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a plan to enact measures to protect the Internet of Russia. In a speech to the Russian National Security Council he said, “we need to greatly improve the security of domestic communications networks and information resources.” Perhaps he should add Internet routing security to his list because, on a number of occasions in the past year, Russian Internet traffic (including domestic traffic) was re-routed out of the country due to routing errors by China Telecom. When international partners carry a country’s domestic traffic out of the country, only to ultimately return it, there are inevitable  security and performance implications.

Last year, Russian mobile provider Vimpelcom and China Telecom signed a network sharing agreement and established a BGP peering relationship. However, as can often happen with these relationships, one party can leak the routes received from the other and effectively insert itself into the path of the other party’s Internet communications. This happened over a dozen times in the past year between these two providers. This is a general phenomenon that occurs with some regularity but isn’t often discussed in BGP security literature. In this blog post, we’ll explore the issue Continue reading

Improving performance and security with a visibility plane in virtual network infrastructures

Node and Link Protection

Node and link protection is a mechanism for protecting LSPs from (you guessed it) the failure of nodes and links.   It differs from fast re-route in that you have to specify node and link protection on the interfaces of all the downstream routers as well as on the LSP at its source.

My network looks like this at the moment, with an LSP running from R5 to R1 using the shortest path determined by the IGP:

Path of LSP R5-to-R1

So on R5, I configure node-link-protection on the LSP:

root@R5> show configuration protocols mpls
no-propagate-ttl;
label-switched-path R5-to-R1 {
    to 10.0.6.1;
    node-link-protection;
}
interface ge-0/0/0.0;
interface ge-0/0/1.0;

This has the effect of signalling to the downstream routers that link and node protection is desired, as you can see here:

root@R5> show mpls lsp name R5-to-R1 detail
Ingress LSP: 6 sessions

10.0.6.1
  From: 10.0.3.5, State: Up, ActiveRoute: 0, LSPname: R5-to-R1
  ActivePath:  (primary)
  Node/Link protection desired                        <===== Node Link Protection 
  LSPtype: Static Configured, Penultimate hop popping
  LoadBalance: Random
  Encoding type: Packet, Switching type: Packet, GPID: IPv4
 *Primary                    State: Up
    Priorities: 7 0
 Continue reading

Setting up the Tools for Contributing to OpenStack Documentation

For non-programmers, making a meaningful contribution to an open source project can be difficult; this is as true for OpenStack as for other open source projects. Documentation is a way to contribute, but in the case of OpenStack there is a non-trivial setup required in order to be able to contribute to the OpenStack documentation. In this post, I’m going to share how to set up the tools to contribute to OpenStack documentation in the hopes that it will help others get past the “barrier to entry” that currently exists.

I’ve long wanted to be more involved in supporting the OpenStack community, beyond my unofficial support via advocacy and blogging about OpenStack. I felt that documentation might be a way to achieve that goal. After all, I’ve written books and have been blogging for 9 years, so I should be able to add some value via documentation contributions. However, the toolchain that the OpenStack documentation uses requires a certain level of familiarity with development-focused tools, and the “how to” guides were less than ideal because of assumptions made regarding the knowledge level of new contributors. For these reasons, I felt that sharing how I (a non-programmer) set up the tools Continue reading

Monitoring OTV – Overlay Transport Virtualization

The Quanta LB4M – Cheap White Box Switching?

“Hey,” said my friend, “are you interested in buying an Ethernet switch? 48 1Gbps copper ports and two 10Gbps fiber uplinks. Very cheap. Layer 2 only, though.” A few minutes later, we were doing business out of the trunk of … Continue reading →

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at The Quanta LB4M – Cheap White Box Switching? and give me a share/like. Thank you!

The Philosophy of Network-as-a-Service

In the world of Anything-as-a-Service (I will leave the acronym to your imagination), Network-as-a-Service is not a new term. In fact, it even has its own wikipedia page which will tell you it has been used for many years now, well before the current set of service related terms in IT have become popular.

Like most high tech industries, we get somewhat carried away when we have some new terminology and quickly overuse and overload them, watering them down to be meaningless or at least highly confusing. But when you cut through the clutter a bit, the as-a-Service terminology most certainly articulates a shift in thought process and behaviors on how we provide and consume IT resources.

The IT organization has always been a service organization, there is nothing much new there. From the days of mainframes and supercomputers, their job was to provide access to these expensive resources and maintain them. They provided environments that allowed the users to conveniently consume these abilities, and the business applications that ran on top of them, whether those were financial systems, email, uucp news (remember those days) or the basic ability to run user created jobs.

With the distribution of compute and Continue reading

Setting up the Tools for Contributing to OpenStack Documentation

For non-programmers, making a meaningful contribution to an open source project can be difficult; this is as true for OpenStack as for other open source projects. Documentation is a way to contribute, but in the case of OpenStack there is a non-trivial setup required in order to be able to contribute to the OpenStack documentation. In this post, I’m going to share how to set up the tools to contribute to OpenStack documentation in the hopes that it will help others get past the “barrier to entry” that currently exists.

I’ve long wanted to be more involved in supporting the OpenStack community, beyond my unofficial support via advocacy and blogging about OpenStack. I felt that documentation might be a way to achieve that goal. After all, I’ve written books and have been blogging for 9 years, so I should be able to add some value via documentation contributions. However, the toolchain that the OpenStack documentation uses requires a certain level of familiarity with development-focused tools, and the “how to” guides were less than ideal because of assumptions made regarding the knowledge level of new contributors. For these reasons, I felt that sharing how I (a non-programmer) set up the tools Continue reading

So You’re an Open Source Shop? Really?

I carried out an interesting quiz during one of my Interop workshop:

• How many use Linux-based servers? Almost everyone raised their hands;
• How many use Apache or Tomcat web servers? Yet again, almost everyone.
• How many run applications written in PHP, Python, Ruby…? Same crowd (probably even a bit more).
• How many use Nginx, Squid or HAProxy for load balancing? Very few.

Is there a rational explanation for this seemingly nonsensical result?

Musing: On Using Cisco ACI and VMware NSX in the same network

So, sure, you COULD run NSX and ACI in the same network. No, you WOULD NOT run NSX and ACI in the same network.

The post Musing: On Using Cisco ACI and VMware NSX in the same network appeared first on EtherealMind.

Show 212 – HP Networking in the Data Centre – Sponsored

In today's sponsored podcast, HP Networking looks to educate network engineers about HP’s data center portfolio and technologies that make it a formidable choice for architecting today’s data center networks. Tune in to learn how HP is helping customers develop Data Center solutions that deal with today and tomorrow’s challenges.

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.

TwitterFacebookGoogle+

The post Show 212 – HP Networking in the Data Centre – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

The Importance of Knowing Baselines

Increased MTTR is Good?

In Episode 167 of The Cloudcast – “Bringing Advanced Analytics to DevOps”, Dave Hayes brings up an interesting point about Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). At about 8:30 in, he states:

“In a counter-intuitive sense, you actually want this to be going up…If you’re removing false alerts, and you’re getting better about the quantity of alerts, you’re going to be solving far fewer, more difficult problems, so you should see a slight trend upwards in Mean Time to Resolution”

This is a really interesting way of looking at things. Obviously you don’t want to set your goal as “Increase our MTTR,” but this could be a positive side-effect of improved processes.

I recommend listening to the whole episode. PagerDuty is a very cool product in itself, but this is a broader discussion about operations, analytics, and best practices.

Subscribe to the podcast while you’re there too. Lots of interesting technology discussed there.