[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

In this post, we will be discussing a relatively new protocol to the SDN scene – OpFlex. This protocol was largely championed by Cisco, but there are a few other vendors that have announced planned support for this protocol. I write this post because – like OVSDB – there tends to be a lot of confusion and false information about this protocol, so my goal in this post is to provide some illustrations that (hopefully) set the record straight, with respect to both OpFlex’s operation, and it’s intended role.

Before I get started, I would be remiss to not point you towards a brilliant article by Kyle Mestery titled “OpFlex is not an OpenFlow Killer“. At the time the article was written, Kyle was working for Noiro, a team within the INSBU at Cisco focused (at least primarily) on open source efforts in SDN, and the creators of OpFlex.

The Declarative Model of Network Programmability

Before we get into the weeds of the OpFlex protocol, it’s important to understand the model that OpFlex intends to address. OpFlex is the protocol du jour within a Cisco ACI based Continue reading

Jim — I’m an Engineer, not a…

Doctor McCoy, on the original Star Trek series had a signature line — he was forever complaining about this or that with the exclamation that he was just a doctor, and not a… Well, whatever, from shuttle driver to politician.

And how many times, in my career, have I wanted to stop in the middle of some meeting and scream, “Jim — I’m an engineer, not a politician!”

After all, there’s some sense in which engineers become engineers because we’re focused on the problem at hand, we’re focused on the technical issue, not the people issue. I once saw a cartoon that expressed the feeling in the technical community almost perfectly — an engineer talking to her manager, who has apparently just been told she needs to work on her “people skills.” Her answer? “I only went into computers in the first place because I don’t like people.”

Exactly.

And there used to be a time when engineers could get away with this. There was once a time when IT was in the basement (we used to joke about putting on the asbestos suites when going down to the basement to get to our desks in one Continue reading

Ansible: Being the Glue So You Don’t Have To

SDN Deployment Considerations

Are you lucky enough to be one of the 87% of North American enterprises that plan to have SDN in production by 2016 or one of the 53% of the companies that plan to have SDN deployed in the near future? Even though we all know how inflated these claims are, you might have to start considering the deployment aspects of a solution a $vendor will persuade your CIO to buy.

New VMworld 2014 Hands-on Labs with VMware NSX Goodness

In 2013 we introduced VMware NSX Hands-on-Labs for the first time. The NSX 1303 Hands-on-lab has been by far one of the most popular labs, giving you an in-depth view of VMware NSX. Hands-on-labs are one of the best ways to get a good tour of the product. You can take all of these labs online at http://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/ . It requires a registration, but is open to everyone. .

This year at VMworld we introduced several new NSX labs to give you a deeper look at NSX, and to showcase the depth of integration NSX provides with 3^rd party partners and other VMware products. All of the new 2014 Hands-on-labs have been published and are available to you. Here is a quick tour of the labs and what you can expect to see.

If you are just getting started with NSX and want to know what Network Virtualization is all about, we recommend you start here.

This lab will walk you through five modules of exercises:

• NSX Components – Host Preparation, Controller deployment
• NSX Logical Switching – building VXLAN logical switches
• NSX Logical Routing  - Distributed Routing, Dynamic Routing with OSPF
• NSX Distributed Firewall – Micro-segmentation with Continue reading

It’s the Applications, Stupid (Part 1 of 3)!

I remember when we first started talking to customers about the concepts of applications driving networks, about 3 years ago (This was a very different conversation from other networking era’s where we talked about ‘intelligent’ networks that could better understand and adapt to applications.) While most customers loved the concepts of a scale-out network that leveraged dynamic photonic connections instead of hard-wired paths, most of them also told us that they “didn’t really know (or want to know)” about the applications at all. Some even said they didn’t want their networks to understand the applications at all!

Hmm.. this was very strange. After all, we were talking to Data Center networking folks, and wasn’t the purpose of the data center network to provide connectivity solutions for applications? How could the folks in charge of these networks not know (and worse, not want to know!) about the whole purpose of their network in the first place?

But of course, it wasn’t really strange. After all, networking, like many IT disciplines, had developed into a nice neat silo that defined nice neat operational boundaries that allowed folks within those boundaries to say “I don’t know, and I don’t want Continue reading

Cisco ACI: Allowing the smarts to scale

As horizontal scalability demands increase for policy based fabrics such as Cisco’s ACI and performance demands push the development of high speed Ethernet standards like 25G, 50G, 100G and beyond in to 400G, how that data is pushed and pulled on the fabric begins to become a problem. In the words of Scotty, devices of today “canne take any more” due to issues with physics, traditional approaches to ASIC interfaces and currently used materials.

A company that was born to attack this problem from a different direction has recently been acquired by Cisco. Memoir, the said acquired startup, has been inserted in to the Insieme business unit within Cisco which says much about the strategy of the policy capable hardware and the company faith in the direction of the ACI strategy. So why Memoir? They offer a solution for multiple areas of memory to be addressed concurrently, making the operation more akin to a parallel one instead of a fast serial operation. They call this: Algorithmic Memory™ and it can increase memory options ten fold!

Cisco in keeping with their origins will always try and hold the hardware networking space. As commodity devices start threatening profits in bread and butter networking, Continue reading

Thinking About Intel Rack-Scale Architecture

You may have heard of Intel Rack-Scale Architecture (RSA), a new approach to designing data center hardware. This is an idea that was discussed extensively a couple of weeks ago at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 in San Francisco, which I had the opportunity to attend. (Disclaimer: Intel paid my travel and hotel expenses to attend IDF.)

Of course, IDF 2014 wasn’t the first time I’d heard of Intel RSA; it was also discussed last year. However, this year I had the chance to really dig into what Intel is trying to accomplish through Intel RSA—note that I’ll use “Intel RSA” instead of just “RSA” to avoid any confusion with the security company—and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and conclusions here.

Intel always seems to present Intel RSA as a single entity that is made up of a number of other technologies/efforts; specifically, Intel RSA is typically presented as:

• Disaggregation of the compute, memory, and storage capacity in a rack

• Silicon photonics as a low-latency, high-speed rack-scale fabric

• Some software that combines disaggregated hardware capacity over a rack-scale fabric to create “pooled systems”

When you look at Intel RSA this way—and this is the way that Continue reading

Formal Announcement: Software Gone Wild Podcast

If you’ve been reading my blog in the last few months, you might have noticed that I started a new podcast focused on software-defined everything (hence the name: Software Gone Wild – thanks to Jason Edelman).

The latest episodes are always available on this page; you can also subscribe to the podcast feed in RSS, Atom or iTunes format… and if you wonder why we need yet-another podcast, read the About Software Gone Wild document.

Where Is Cisco UCS Headed?

If you happen to read my writing(as infrequent as it is these days), you know that I am a networking focused person. I live my day to day within the walls of routing, switching, wireless, and other “network centric” platforms and technologies. The days of Unix, Windows, and other generalist type administration duties are gone for me. However, like many IT professionals, I have a strong desire to understand all of the different areas in order to enhance my capabilities within the networking space. If you wish to implement IT in any particular silo, it helps to understand all the different pieces. With that in mind, I happily accepted my invite to the Cisco UCS Grand Slam event in New York City a few weeks ago. My involvement with Cisco UCS usually stops at the fabric interconnect point, and occasionally down into the virtual networking piece as well.

I mention that to state that while I understand the moving parts within storage, compute, and virtualization, I DON’T understand it at the level of people who live in those worlds full time. In light of that, I have to point out that I may be completely wrong in my predictions or Continue reading

[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

No More Single Panes of Glass

The term “Single Pane of Glass” became something of a running joke during Network Field Day 8. The term has become over-used & abused, and it’s time we stopped using it. Time to find better terminology.

According to TechTarget:

A single pane of glass is a phrase used by information technology (IT) marketers to describe a management console that integrates information from multiple components into a unified display

All my information in one place? Sounds good, right? I like Single Panes of Glass. I like them a lot. In fact, I like them so much, I have several. Vendors like them too, so they’ve all got one.

And there’s the rub. The term is over-loaded, with every vendor using the term to describe their management console that can be used for managing all of their systems. The problem is that most vendors only see things from the perspective of their products. They don’t see things from the wider perspective of an organisation that is trying to use many different products to achieve business outcomes.

So the network vendor has a Single Pane of Glass (SPoG) that manages all the network, the MDM vendor has their SPoG for managing mobile Continue reading

Secret Sunday – Mr Ethan C Banks

This week’s Secret Sunday post is a pointer to a fairly well known blogger, Ethan Banks. Yes, he’s well known for co-hosting the popular Packet Pushers podcast and he is an all round good guy, but his blog – especially of … Continue reading →

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Secret Sunday – Mr Ethan C Banks and give me a share/like. Thank you!

Secure browser-to-proxy communication – again

I've previously blogged about a secure connection between browser and proxy. Unfortunately that doesn't work on Android yet, since except if you use Google for Work (an enterprise offering) you can't set Proxy Auto-Config.

This post shows you how to get that working for Android. Also it skips the stunnel hop since it doesn't add value and only makes Squid not know your real address. I'm here also using username and password to authenticate to the proxy instead of client certificates, to make it easier to set up.

First, why you would want to do this

• You have machines behind NAT, and a proxy that can see the inside while still accessible form the outside

  This way you can port forward one port from the NAT box to the proxy, and not have to use different ports everywhere. I'll call this proxy corp-proxy.example.com.

• You have servers that don't implement their own authentication, and you want the proxy to do it for you

  If you set up so that the only way to Continue reading

IP Subnetting Part 5: Subnetting Across the Octet Boundary

Throughout this series, we have examined several fundamental building blocks of subnetting. In IP Subnetting Part 4, we looked at what was required to subnet a Class C network. This article takes the fundamentals one step further and looks at subnetting a Class A address. We will also add the complexity of crossing octet the octet boundary for both the subnet and the host portions of the address.

A Class A IP address has the following characteristics–

• I’s first octet begins with binary 0…….
• The first Octet will be in the range of 1 to 63 (0 is invalid)
• The first Octet (leftmost) represent the Network
• The last three Octets (rightmost) represents a Host on a network

You will also recall that a single network can be subnetting into multiple, smaller networks.

Using a consistent syntax, we could represent a Class A network as follows.

10.0.0.0

In this example--

Green represents the Classful Network
Blue represents the Host address

10.0.0.0 is would be a Network based on the fact that the host portion is 0.0.0. This is literally zero. Had the address been 10.0.0.1, 10.0.1.0 or 10.1.0.0 Continue reading

Network Field Day 8 – #NFD8

After watching the Tech Field Day (TFD) events for a while, I decided to fill out the form and apply to be a delegate. With the events being based in the USA, me being based in the UK and my status not being at the power blogger level of the likes of Ethan Banks, Greg Ferro or Ivan Pepelnjak, the perceived chances of actually being selected to go were negligible to none. So how surprised was I when I received an email with an invite? You could have blown me over with a feather, so much so, the whole side of the train carriage I was sitting in at the time all heard the “whoop whoop” I decided to share!

So for any new delegates or those that want to know how it plays out, your travel, accommodation and pretty much all arrangements are taken care of by Gestalt IT and the TFD team. You just have to worry about getting to and from your chosen airport to depart and return.

The week that the event takes place in is northing short of hectic and by my experience was superbly executed by Steve Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth. You can pretty Continue reading

ThousandEyes – NOC for the Internet?

ThousandEyes is a network monitoring company that provides application performance visibility across the Internet. They don’t just show how an application is performing, but can identify where across the Internet issues are occurring. Ethan Banks has written up some of the use cases. Recently I realised I could start thinking of them as a “NOC for the Internet.”

I was fortunate enough to attend Network Field Day 8, where ThousandEyes was one of the presenters. During their presentation Mohit Lad gave a demonstration of using ThousandEyes to investigate performance issues:

The problem with troubleshooting issues across the Internet is that it’s hard to get the complete visibility you need to track down where issues are happening. ThousandEyes helps, by giving you more viewpoints, but there’s still limits. Most of us can’t afford to run tests from hundreds of different public & private locations.

Interpreting data is also a challenge. ThousandEyes has done their best to make the data usable, but you might not have the networking resources to be able to fully understand what’s going on. You need both wider visibility, and the experience to fully interpret it.

That’s why I was very pleased to hear the exchange starting Continue reading

Prescriptive Topology Manager (PTM) support with NX-API on the Nexus 9000?