FCoE versus FC Farce (I’m Tellin’ All Y’All It’s Sabotage!)

Updates 2/6/2014:

  • @JohnKohler noticed that the UCS Manager screenshot used (see below) is from a UCS Emulator, not any system they used for testing.
  • Evaluator Group promises answers to questions that both I and Dave Alexander (@ucs_dave) have brought up.

On my way back from South America/Antarctica, I was pointed to a bake-off/performance test commissioned by Brocade and performed by a company called Evaluator Group. It compared the performance of edge FCoE (non-multi-hop FCoE) to native 16 Gbit FC. The FCoE test was done on a Cisco UCS blade system connecting to a Brocade switch, and the FC was done on an HP C7000 chassis system connecting to the same switch. At first glance, it would seem to show that FC is superior to FCoE for a number of reasons.

I’m not a Cisco fanboy, but I am a Cisco UCS fanboy, so I took great interest in the report. (I also work for a Cisco Learning Partner as Continue reading

Introducing Community Channel – Insert Your Podcast Here

A place for anyone to start a podcast with the Packet Pushers.

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 Introducing Community Channel – Insert Your Podcast Here appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Show 178 – Cisco Nexus 1000v and Microsoft Hyper-V

Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch for Microsoft Hyper-V and integrates with your existing Nexus 1000V deployment. In this episode we talk with Appaji Malla and Balaji Sivasubramanian from the Hyper-V Product team on the architecture of the product and platform.

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 178 – Cisco Nexus 1000v and Microsoft Hyper-V appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Tab Completion on Cumulus Linux

This film could have ended much differently

if Jerry were running Cumulus Linux 

The TAB key on my keyboard gets a lot of use. Whether I'm looking at a bash prompt on a *NIX system or logged into a router's CLI, I almost never type whole commands.

In the bash shell, tab completion capabilities are usually limited to helping complete:

  • shell built-in commands
  • external executables found in $PATH
  • file names
  • directory names
Completion in bash doesn't help with things like command line arguments to various commands, but it is (sometimes) smart enough to not offer filenames as completion options to the 'cd' command, choosing instead to only offer directories.

Network devices, on the other hand, tend to have really rich inline help / command completion stuff, and I live by it.

Rather than typing abbreviated commands, I prefer to let the system help me type the whole thing, partly because it eliminates errors, and partly because I usually can't remember the exact syntax for a given platform. Cisco's godawful platform-dependent mac-address-table vs. mac address-table comes immediately to mind as something that always seems to take more than one attempt.

So, rather than typing this:
ROUTER#sh ip bg vpnv4 vr Continue reading

Separating Hype from Reality in SDN

Lately, two acronyms have been making the rounds: SDN (Software Defined Networking) and ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure – promoted by Cisco). Both have things in common which equate to great marketing: a delightful vision and being difficult to pin down in terms of a crisp definition. Let me try to clarify as best I can with the disclaimer that this is purely my perspective representing Arista, as we celebrate the deployment of our second million ports of cloud networking.
The common view is that SDN is a controller or a set of network management products based on Virtualization Technologies or OpenFlow. At Arista we have a more pragmatic view. To us, SDN is a programmatic suite of open interfaces that allows applications to drive networking actions. Unlike the misconception that SDN is just a controller, I believe SDN is about scaling the control, management and data plane with programmatic and open interfaces. This means customizing the network with high-level scripting and programmatic languages, structured and machine-readable APIs, and standards-based protocols as well as interoperability with controller-friendly networks.
As we enter 2014, we are witnessing the deployment of SDN via Arista EOS and associated programmable network applications such as Advanced Telemetry, Continue reading

How to install Kali Linux in Virtualbox : Step-By-Step guide.

Dale Rapp:

Great step by step instructions on how to install Kali Linux in VirtualBox. Plenty of screen shots for those visual people and it really helps tell how the configuration and install should work.

Originally posted on kanishkas how to?:

Oracle Virtualbox is an open source virtualization software that can be downloaded from here. It runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems . Now we are going to see how to install Kali Linux in Virtualbox. I am using the latest release of Virtualbox for this howto.  After downloading and installing virtualbox, open it. Click on New as shown below.

Image

The “Create virtual machine” window opens. Type the name of the virtual machine.  select type as Linux and version as Linux 2.6 or Debian. Click on Next.

Image

Then select the RAM for your virtual machine. I put it to 512MB. Make choice according to the memory available in your system. Make sure it is above or same as recommended memory. Click Next.

Image

The size of the hard disk is automatically assigned. We can change it later. I suggest you…

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On The Ground at OpenDaylight Summit 2014

I was fortunate enough to spend this morning (and will be here for quite a while) in Silicon Valley at the first ever OpenDaylight Summit. The initial keynotes were good, but for me the event started last night when I had the opportunity to sit with some of my own industry role models and just talk nerdy, nerdy networking. Considering how very young this project is (10 months), there are a surprisingly large number of people here - over 550 attendees.

On The Ground at OpenDaylight Summit 2014

I was fortunate enough to spend this morning (and will be here for quite a while) in Silicon Valley at the first ever OpenDaylight Summit. The initial keynotes were good, but for me the event started last night when I had the opportunity to sit with some of my own industry role models and just talk nerdy, nerdy networking. Considering how very young this project is (10 months), there are a surprisingly large number of people here - over 550 attendees.

Addressing 2013

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. What happened in 2013 and what is likely to happen in 2014? This is an update to the reports prepared at the same time in previous years, so lets see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet, and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.

SDN Themes from ONUG – Let the ASIC go

Edit: I banged this out on the flight home from ONUG four months ago. Just found it in the drafts folder. ONUG's spring 2014 conference in New York is just 3 months away.

I was privileged to attend the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Conference, ONUG Academy and mini Tech Field Day event hosted by JP Morgan Chase on October 29 and 30.
I attended at someone else's expense. Disclaimer.

ASICs came up a lot during these couple of days. Following are some ASIC-related things I heard and overheard at ONUG.

Sun Microsystems was overly attached to their SPARC processor (and so was I!) Folks inside Sun made efforts to derail Solaris x86, in order to protect their favorite server platform, and contributed to killing the company altogether. Sad story.

As good as your ASIC is, you'll never keep up with the performance of commodity chipsets. If the whitebox stuff is faster and still good enough to do the job, then it's probably going to win. It's certainly going to cost less. The proprietary ASIC may be better and have more features, but better is the enemy of good enough.

People used to route packets using general-purpose servers Continue reading

CCDE Experience – Free Webex Session


The next CCDE practical exam will take place on 20th February 2014 at 275 Pearson Professional Centers (PPC) testing facilities worldwide. I'm planning to conduct free webex session of "CCDE Experience" on next Sunday 9th February at 6 am UTC to explain about CCDE program, how to prepare for it, and tips and tricks based on my personal experience taking the exam several times.

The webex session will be conducted in English. This is my personal initiative to promote CCDE program, with disclaimer: no guarantee you will pass the exam after you follow my suggested study plan. I use public material for the session. And I will use the opportunity to introduce my idea of Project DEW. Anyone can join this webex, you just need to register using the link below. I expect no NDA question during the session.

Topic: CCDE Experience
Date: Sunday, February 9, 2014
Time: 10:00 am, Arabian Time (Abu Dhabi, Muscat, GMT+04:00)

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To register for this meeting
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1. Go to https://cisco.webex.com/ciscosales/j.php?ED=253413112&RG=1&UID=2234307082&RT=MiMzNg%3D%3D
2. Register for the meeting.

Once the host approves your request, you will receive a confirmation email with instructions for joining the meeting

Review: Cloud Architecture Patterns

Cloud Architecture Patterns Bill Wilder Networks support applications. Okay, that might seem a little obvious, but it needs to be said from time to time. In that vein, I often find it useful to get a better grip on the applications people are putting on networks, and how they expect the network to behave. In […]

Author information

Russ White

Russ White
Principle Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White is a Network Architect who's scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about, or don't really care about. You want numbers and letters? Okay: CCIE 2635, CCDE 2007:001, CCAr, BSIT, MSIT (Network Design & Architecture, Capella University), MACM (Biblical Literature, Shepherds Theological Seminary). Russ is a Principal Engineer in the IPOS Team at Ericsson, where he works on lots of different stuff, serves on the Routing Area Directorate at the IETF, and is a cochair of the Internet Society Advisory Council. Russ will be speaking in November at the Ericsson Technology Day. he recently published The Art of Network Architecture, is currently working on a new book in the area Continue reading

Quiz #22 – Policy Based Routing (PBR) Problem or Not ?

Your company has 3 sites, each with a dedicated border router, R1, R2 and R3.
Site-1 (R1) and Site-2 (R2) have their own internet uplinks, but Site-3 (R3) connects to internet via R2. A GRE tunnel is built between R2 and R3 and applied an MTU of 1440, due to some constraints in the transit network between them. You notice that traffic between same pair of devices works for TCP 1001 but fails for TCP 1002. What's wrong ?

FAT or Entropy Label?

In this article we are going to see two features that improve the load-balancing in the MLPS Core. Why? In the networking when dealing with redundancy of links or paths we are facing the polarization issue. This problem happens when one of the link is congested. Let’s take the example of LAGs, if the hashing […]

Author information

Youssef El Fathi

Youssef El Fathi

Youssef is a network engineer working for a french service provider. He is also a dual CCIE (RS, SP). You can find him on Twitter.

The post FAT or Entropy Label? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Youssef El Fathi.

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