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

What they claim about NetNeutrality is a lie

“Save NetNeutrality”

“NetNeutrality is technical”

IDF 2014: Bare Metal, Docker Containers, and Virtualization

This is a live blog of session DATS004, titled “Bare-Metal, Docker Containers, and Virtualization: The Growing Choices for Cloud Applications.” The speaker is Nicholas Weaver (yes, that Nick Weaver, who now works at Intel).

Weaver starts his presentation by talking about “how we got here”, discussing the various technological shifts that have affected the computing landscape over the years. Weaver includes a discussion of the drivers behind virtualization as well as the pros and cons of virtualization.

That, naturally, leads to a discussion of containers. Containers are not all that new—Solaris Zones is a form of containers that existed back in 2004. Naturally, the recent hype associated with Docker has, according to Weaver, rejuvenated interest in the concept of containers.

Before Weaver gets too far into containers, he first provides a background of some of the core containerization pieces. This includes cgroups (the ability to control resource allocation/utilization), which is built into the Linux kernel. Namespace isolation is also important, which provides full process isolation (so that one process can’t see processes in another namespace). Namespace isolation isn’t just for processes; there’s also isolation for network entities, mounts, and users. LXC is a set of user-space tools that attempted Continue reading

IDF 2014: Virtualizing the Network to Enable SDI

This is a liveblog of IDF 2014 session DATS002, titled “Virtualizing the Network to Enable a Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI)”. The speakers are Brian Johnson (Solutions Architect, Intel) and Jim Pinkerton (Windows Server Architect, Microsoft). I attended a similar session last year; I’m hoping for some new information this year.

Pinkerton starts the session with a discussion of why Microsoft is able to speak to network virtualization via their experience with large-scale web properties (Bing, XBox Live, Outlook.com, Office, etc.). To that point, Microsoft has over 100K servers across their cloud properties, with >200K diverse services, first-party applications, and third-party applications. This amounts to $15 billion in data center investments. Naturally, all of this runs on Windows Server and Windows Azure.

So why does networking need to be transformed for the cloud? According to Pinkerton, the goal is to drive agility and flexibility for your business. This is accomplished by pooling and automating network resources, ensuring tenant isolation, maximizing scale/performance, enabling seamless capacity expansion and workload mobility, and minimizing operational complexity.

Johnson takes over here to talk about how Intel is working to address the challenges and needs that Pinkerton just outlined. This breaks down into three core Continue reading

Participate in the “Internet Slowdown” with One Click

Net Neutrality is an important issue for CloudFlare as well as for our more than 2 million customers, whose success depends on a vibrant, dynamic, and open Internet. An open Internet promotes innovation, removes barriers to entry, and provides a platform for free expression.

That's why we’re announcing a new app that lets you easily participate in the “Internet Slowdown” on September 10th, 2014.

Battleforthenet.com (a project of Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, Fight for the Future, and Free Press) has organized a day of protest against the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online. Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible.

As we’ve seen that bandwidth pricing is not reflective of the underlying fair market value when Internet service providers have monopolistic control, we can only fret that a similar situation will be presented by a lack of net neutrality.

The Battle for the Net pop-up (intentionally obtrusive) will simulate a loading screen that website users may see Continue reading

IDF 2014 Day 1 Keynote

This is a liveblog for the day 1 keynote at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014. The keynote starts with an interesting musical piece that shows how technology can be used to allow a single performer to emulate the sound of a full band, and then kicks off with a “pocket avatar” presentation by Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel Corporation. Krzanich takes the stage in person a few minutes later.

Krzanich starts with a recap of some of the discussions from last year’s IDF, and he points out some of the results over the last year. Among the accomplishments Krzanich lists, he mentions that Intel was the #2 shipper of tablets last year. (One would assume that Apple is #1.) Krzanich clearly believes that Intel has a bright future; he points out that projections show as many as 50 billion x86-based devices by 2020 (just 6 years away). That’s pretty massive growth; there are only an estimated 2.2 billion x86-based devices today.

The line-up today includes talks from Diane Bryant (data center), Kirk Skaugen (clients), Doug Fisher (software and services), and a live Q&A by Krzanich.

Krzanich starts a discussion of wearables and related devices with a mention of Continue reading