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.

Viva España – Heading to HP Discover

It’s ironic to end the 30 day challenge by not posting for a short while, but what can I say? I’ve been very busy! Today I’m traveling to Barcelona to attend the HP Discover 2014 Barcelona event as a guest of HP’s Independent Blogger Programme. It looks like HP will be keeping us busy while we’re there, so I would predict quite a few posts coming out of this trip in the near future and I’m looking forwarding to hearing more about what HP is up to.

In early October I posted about HP’s SDN Mojo and OpenFlow deployment at Interop after they presented to us as part of Tech Field Day Extra. In that post I was impressed that HP had moved from talk to action as regards OpenFlow. I wonder what else HP has up its sleeves?

Do take a moment to check out HP Discover Barcelona 2014 and look at the Content Catalog. If nothing else, check out the SDN sessions in the content catalog. Hopefully that link will take you directly to the right results; there are some interesting sessions on that topic alone.

Like other events, HP will also be streaming some content live for Continue reading

Cisco VIRL goes public

It’s been a few years since the first whispers started leaking out about Cisco building an in-house software emulation platform. A Dynamips/GNS-like program that natively caters for the needs of Cisco students and engineers in the field has been a hot topic for a long time. Early last year Cisco made official mention that they […]

ExtremeXOS, Arista and Cisco vIOS-Layer2 Virtual GNS3 Lab

ExtremeXOS is a network operating system used in Extreme Networks network switches. Virtualized version of ExtremeXOS - EXOS virtual machine vmdk image can be used to build virtual lab without need to use hardware switches. Although ExtremeXOS virtual machine can be downloaded for free only certain features are known to work. For this reason software should not be used for testing any actual networking setups or performance tests.

The tutorial consist of two parts. The part one explains how to configure Qemu emulator to run ExtremeXOS virtual machine. In part two, ExtremeXOS VM is connected to virtual lab run by GNS3 software. In this lab, features such as VLANs, 802.1q trunks and OSPF routing protocol are tested between multilayer switches from different vendors - Cisco, Arista and Extreme Networks.

Host Software and Hardware Requirements

  • Linux x86-64,
  • Qemu emulator version 2.1.2 (qemu-system-x86_64, qemu-system-i386 ) or later,
  • GNS3 version 1.1 or later,
  • RAM - at least 4 GB,
  • CPU with hardware virtualization support (VT-x or AMD-V)

Virtual Machines Software and Hardware Requirements

  • ExtremeXOS VM 15.3.2, exosvm.vmdk,
    RAM 256 MB ,CPU x86-64
    Qemu additional parameters: -nographic -enable-kvm
  • Vios_l2-ADVENTERPRISEK9-M), Version 15.0, vIOS-L2.vmdk,
    RAM 512MB, Continue reading

PQ Show 37 – Fancy Network Adapters with Solarflare

As servers get faster, network speed and latency is impacted by the performance of network adapters inside the server. There are many after market options for radically improving the throughput and latency performance and we discuss them in this 20 minute show.

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 PQ Show 37 – Fancy Network Adapters with Solarflare appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Mininet Internals and Network Namespaces

Mininet is a very powerful virtual network emulation system that’s generally used in SDN development environments. With Mininet, a complex network with hundreds of switches can be simulated in a laptop and this opens up testing real-life network usecases. I have covered Mininet usage in 1 of my earlier blogs on tools used with Opendaylight. … Continue reading Mininet Internals and Network Namespaces →

QFX5100 default config

Just for reference, here’s the config a QFX5100 comes with out of the box.  

Notes:

Initially the switch tries to get an IP address on the vme0 and irb interfaces so that it can do an auto-image-upgrade, but that failed in the lab since no server (nor the appropriate DHCP options) were available.   The result was an irritating repeated message on the console about this.  To get rid of that, “deactivate chassis auto-image-upgrade”.   This is probably for use if the QFX switch is part of a Q-Fabric – presumably it is trying to upgrade itself over the management network to the version the rest of the QFabric is running.

All interfaces are in the default VLAN, even though their membership is not reflected in the config.

All interfaces have RSTP enabled.

Unfortunately all interfaces are listed twice if they’re  dual-mode (i.e. SFP or SFP+).  This makes the initial config very long.  Obviously this can be deleted.

version 13.2X51-D20.2;
system {
    host-name QFX5100-4;
    arp {
        aging-timer 5;
    }
    root-authentication {
        encrypted-password "REMOVED"; ## SECRET-DATA
    }
    login {
        user imtech {
            uid 2000;
 Continue reading
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