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VMworld 2014 Networking and Security Session Guide

At last year’s show, we introduced you to VMware NSX, and presented a vision for how network virtualization will fundamentally change data center networking. We focused a lot on what NSX is, what it does, and why you should start planning to virtualize your network.

This year, we’re still focused on the basics. We have a lot of content that will help those of you who are new to network virtualization and NSX start to establish a base. But of course, we have a whole year of selling NSX under our belt. And we want to share that experience with you in a VMworld program that will take you, and NSX, to the next level.

Security and network micro-segmentation?  We’ve got it covered.  Customer deployment stories? You bet. Partners with real GA solutions, solving real-world problems? They are on the agenda.

Take a pass through the list below, and then check out the schedule builder on VMworld.com to organize your week.

We think the #NSXninjas will be out in full force at VMworld. Are you one?  We hope so!

Monday August 25^, 2014

Networking Sessions

NET1846	Introduction to NSX	11:00 – 12:00 PM
NET1214	NSX Continue reading

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Balanced Buffer Design for Mission-Critical Cloud Networks

Leading customers and researchers in cloud and data center networking have been promoting the importance of understanding the impact of TCP/IP flow and congestion control, speed mismatch and adequate buffering for many decades. The problem space has not changed during this time, but the increase in the rates of speed by 100X and in storage capacity by 1000X have aggravated the problem of reliable performance under load for data intensive content and for storage applications, in particular. One Arista fan summed it up best by saying:

“Basically the numbers have changed by order of magnitude, but the problem is the same!”

Poor performance and inadequate buffering in a demanding network is a painful reminder that buffering, flow control, and congestion management must be properly designed. TCP/IP was not inherently built for rate-fairness, and packets are intentionally dropped (yes, only window fairness is possible). Yet the effect of these drops can be multiplicative given major speed mismatches of 10-100X inside the data center. In the past, QoS and rate metering were adequate. However, at multi-gigabit and terabit speeds and particularly as more storage moves from Fiber Channel (with buffer credits) to Ethernet, packet loss gets more acute.

Benefits of Balanced Continue reading

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The Canadian Bitcoin Hijack

A few days ago researchers at Dell SecureWorks published the details of an attacker repeatedly hijacking BGP prefixes for numerous large providers such as Amazon, OVH, Digital Ocean, LeaseWeb, Alibaba and more. The goal of the operation was to intercept data between Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin mining pools. They estimated that $83,000 was made with this attack in just four months. The original post has many of details which we won’t repeat here, instead will take a closer look at  the BGP details of this specific attack.

Attack details
Our friends at Dell SecureWorks decided not to name the network from which the hijacks originated. As a result we won’t name the exact Autonomous System either, instead we will suffice by saying that the originator of this hijack is a network operating in Eastern Canada.

Initial experiment
BGPmon detected the first hijack by this Canadian Autonomous System on October 8th 2013. For about 14 minutes a more specific /24 prefix for a Palestinian network was hijacked. Looking at geographical scope of the announcements and the probes that saw this route, we believe that in this case the route was only announced over the Toronto Internet Exchange.

Bitcoin hijack
On Feb Continue reading

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Let’s Connect at VMworld 2014

I’ll be at VMworld in a couple of weeks. If you’re a vendor that would like to chat, please schedule me. I’d be happy to meet. If you’re a fellow IT engineer, I’d be happy to meet up as well. I’ll be hanging with folks from Tech Field Day, as well as Chris […]

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Downloads

Here is a repository of Wi-Fi related documents and resources that WLAN administrators will find useful.

If you have a Wi-Fi related document, tool, or resource that you would like included on this list, please contact me for inclusion! My contact info is listed on the right column of this website.

Revolution Wi-Fi Downloads:

Designing WLANs for Capacity

35 presentation slides, PDF format.

This presentation covers an approach and methodology to integrating WLAN capacity planning into the WLAN design process to allow network engineers to effectively meet growing capacity demands by clients on wireless networks. It defines what capacity means for a WLAN, what factors determine capacity, provides an approach to designing for capacity, and where capacity planning should be integrated into the overall WLAN design process.

Effective capacity planning is required for all WLANs, not just high-density environments.

This information was presented at the WLAN Professionals Conference (2014).

You can also

watch the presentation video

and download the

capacity planning worksheets

to help calculate capacity needs, which helps simplify the process and step the user through each step.

Wi-Fi SSID Overhead Calculator

Excel Spreadsheet format.

This tool allows WLAN administrators to assess the network performance impact that multiple SSIDs Continue reading

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SSID Overhead Calculator

One of the most commonly cited best practices among Wi-Fi professionals is to the limit the number of SSIDs you have configured on your WLAN in order to reduce the amount of overhead on the network and to maintain high performance. But there is not a lot of public data out there to really drive home this point when explaining it to another engineer, management, or a customer. Simply telling someone that they shouldn't create more than 'X' number of SSIDs isn't very convincing.

Therefore, I've created a visual tool to help you explain WHY too many SSIDs is a bad thing:

The Wi-Fi SSID Overhead Calculator
(Click Image to Download)

Wi-Fi SSID Overhead Calculator

This tool calculates the percentage of airtime used by 802.11 beacon frames based on the following variables:

1. Beacon Data Rate - beacon frames are sent at the lowest Basic / Mandatory data rate configured on the WLAN. Beacons must be sent at a "legacy" data rate, meaning only 802.11a/b/g rates. Select the beacon data rate from the drop-down menu within the tool.
   
2. Beacon Frame Size - beacon frames can vary in size based on the version of the 802.11 standard implemented (802. Continue reading

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Show 200 – State of the Pushers

With 2.5 Million downloads over 4 years and more 250 shows, Greg and Ethan talk honestly and openly about the future of Packet Pushers, the increasing impact on our personal lives and the choices we face in the months ahead. What few people understand is that producing the Packet Pushers podcasts takes a lot of […]

Author information

The post Show 200 – State of the Pushers appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

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Security policies on vSwitch/dvSwitch

As described on previous posts both vSwitch and dvSwitch can enforce networking through three policies: Option Default on vSwitch dvSwitch PortGroup Promiscuous mode  Reject Reject MAC address changes  Accept Reject Forged transmits  Accept Reject Let’s describe what each policy can prevent and cannot. Promiscuous mode The promiscuous mode allows a VM to put a vNIC […]

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Segment Routing on IOS-XR

Cisco has released some support for segment-routing on IOS-XR 5.2.0 so what better time to lab it up. I’ve got four IOS-XRv boxes running 5.2.0: RP/0/0/CPU0:XR1#sh ver | include XR Cisco IOS XR Software, Version 5.2.0[Default] Currently IS-IS is the only protocol with support in XR. There are drafts to get this working in both […]

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What is Metadata and Why Should I Care?

August 2014 is proving yet again to be an amusing month in the Australian political scene, and in this case the source of the amusement was watching a number of Australian politicians fumble around the topic of digital surveillance and proposed legislation relating to data retention measures.

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VMware NSX Customer Story: Colt Decreases Data Center Networking Complexity

Adoption of network virtualization and SDN technologies from VMware and Arista Networks simplifies cloud infrastructure and enables automation to reduce timescales of cloud and network service provisioning

Offering the largest enterprise-class cloud footprint in Europe, Colt, an established leader in delivering integrated network, data center, voice and IT services, has implemented software-  defined networking [SDN] and network virtualization to simplify how its managed IT and cloud-based networking environment is deployed, managed and scaled throughout its data centers.

Following an extensive review, Colt selected Arista to provide high speed 10 and 40 gigabit Ethernet cloud-centric switches as an underlay network fabric and VMware NSX™ network virtualization to deliver a fully decoupled software network overlay.

SDN paves the way for automated cloud service delivery

The shift to SDN will provide a flexible, scalable, efficient and cost effective way to support the delivery of Colt’s managed IT services, including cloud based services. This makes Colt one of the first service providers in Europe to adopt SDN in a production environment to remove  automate cloud service delivery.

As a result of deploying a new network architecture based on Arista and VMware networking technologies, the time for Colt to add, change or modify services will Continue reading

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Using LISP for IPv6 tunnelling.

In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network.

LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity. This means it can be used for such cool things as mobility, being VM’s or a mobile data connection.

However another aspect of using LISP involves its tunneling mechanism. This is what I will be using in my example to provide the IPv6 islands the ability to communicate over the IPv4-only backbone.

There is alot of terminology involved with LISP, but i will only use some of them here for clarity. If you want to know more about LISP, a good place to start is http://lisp.cisco.com.

The topology i will be using is a modified version of one presented in a Cisco Live presentation called “BRKRST-3046 – Advanced LISP – Whats in it for me?”. I encourage you to view this as well for more information.

Here is the topology:

Some background information about the setup. Both Site 1 and Site 2 are using EIGRP as the IGP. Both IPv4 and Continue reading

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VMworld sessions up for viewing. It’s free to!

How’s that for a topic out of left field, never before seen on my blog. VMWare! Well, I got wind that WMworld sessions are available to watch for free so I just wanted to spread the word. All you need to do is create an account, you can find the sessions here. I’ll say It’s nice […]

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HP NNMi 10.00 Released

HP NNMi version 10.0 has been released. This is a good release, with many usability enhancements. I’m pleased to see continued development, as the future nirvana of all-powerful software defined networks hasn’t quite arrived yet. For now, we still have to manage our networks the old-fashioned way: SNMP is still alive & kicking.

NNMi – Background

HP NNMi is a spiritual descendant of HP OpenView, one of the first network monitoring tools. Between versions 6 and 7, HP completely re-wrote the NNM code, and now we have NNMi. The core product performs network discovery and fault monitoring. Add-on components (iSPIs) offer performance monitoring, NetFlow analysis, IP SLA monitoring, etc. A sister-product (HP Network Automation) is used for network configuration management. The add-on components were all separately licensed, but HP now bundles products together.

Historically NNMi has focused on underlying network monitoring capabilities, and less on the user interface. This meant that almost anything was technically possible, but the visual experience was underwhelming. The integration between core product and add-on components was limited.

The last major release was 9.20, in June 2012. There have been minor enhancements and fixes since, but the last patch was in September 2013. We’ve been due for Continue reading

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Network Dictionary – Default Free Zone

Define "Default Free Zone" or DFZ Routing

The post Network Dictionary – Default Free Zone appeared first on EtherealMind.

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Why logging is so important? VSS example.

Example: Why switch in VSS mode crashed? Few weeks ago there was a great podcast about logging (show 192). Recently I came with great example about how important logging is. If there is only one thing that I could pick up from the podcast it would be following statement “log as much as you can, […]

Author information

The post Why logging is so important? VSS example. appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Michał Janowski.

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What is Service Chaining?

This post is in response to a comment on one of my previous posts on using MPLS in the Data Center. Service chaining has been getting a lot of press — and I’m encountering it a lot in the customers I’m talking to. What’s the big deal? To understand service chaining, let’s look at a […]

Author information

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OSPF Enhancements in recent IOS versions

OSPFv3 Authentication Trailer In 2011 I wrote an article showing that in order to provide authenticated OSPFv3 neighbour sessions, you needed the security license on IOS. Manav Bhatia commented on that post stating they were working on an IETF standard to fix this. That draft became RFC6506 and then RFC7166 Cisco has added support for […]

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OpenStack taining

There are two buzzwords floating around. Cloud and SDN.

They are even closely related.

For now, SDN is mostly a buzzword but Cloud is actually something people are using daily, such as AWS, Azure, Rackspace, Google and others.

As network engineer, my chances of touching or even seeing the details of the backends of those public clouds are quit small. However, private clouds are different.

With private clouds, as it was with VMWare installations, network engineers are expected to be able to support and install the network side of things.

So I have decided to jump in and learn private clouds. And for me, the best way to learn is always hands on.

OpenStack has these online training guides: http://docs.openstack.org/training-guides/content/

I'll jump right in and do the Operator Training Guide.

I'll publish a series of posts with my experience with the training material, and I'll update this post with links to all of the posts.

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Blog status report 2014

The occasion of my fiftieth post is a good milestone to pause and look back on the two years since I started blogging about open-source routing and network simulation. I will review the blog’s performance statistics and reflect on why I started this blog and what I want to do next.

The chart above shows the blog traffic over the past two years, starting in August 2012. In the first year I thought I would reach only a small audience but, as I posted more content, more users found my blog. In the past twelve months, 29,500 unique users visited this blog. Traffic grew steadily almost every month in the past year.

Users from almost every country on Earth have visited this blog. The map below illustrates the number of users in each country who have visited the blog during the past twelve months, with shades of blue representing the number of users.

I considered writing a technical blog after listening to the audiobook Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuck, read by the author. The audiobook was very inspirational and made me understand that writing a blog could be a positive experience.

The next book I read was Technical Blogging Continue reading