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Okay, Maybe it IS the Network (Infographic)

Okay, Maybe it IS the Network (Infographic)

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by Steve Harriman, VP of Marketing - July 22, 2014

“It’s NOT the network.” If you work in networking, this refrain is familiar to you. While we all know the network is sometimes the cause of performance issues, often network engineers spend too much time proving the negative. However, the infographic below, based on a survey of 250 enterprise networking professionals in North America (and 22% in Europe), indicates that the network is the logical first place to look when troubleshooting performance issues. This is because both the scope and size of networks are growing to keep up with the demands of new architectures as well as business requests, making it increasingly more complex to deliver applications and services. These results and others are from a new Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research paper titled “Managing Networks in the Age of Cloud, SDN, and Big Data: Network Management Megatrends 2014.” 

As authors Jim Frey and Tracy Corbo write in the paper’s introduction: 

“Networks have never been more critical to the success of IT and the business. New virtualization and Cloud technologies and services are remaking the face of IT and the Continue reading

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[SDN Protocols] Part 1 – OpenFlow Basics

Let’s get into our first topic. And what better place to start than with the protocol that arguably started the SDN madness that we’re experiencing today - OpenFlow! I got fairly carried away with writing about this protocol, and understandably so - this is a complicated topic. That’s why I’ve split this post (which is already part of a series - very meta, much deep) into two parts. This post - Part 1 - will address OpenFlow’s mid to high-level concepts, exploring what it does, why/how the idea of control plane abstraction may be useful, and some details on how hardware interaction works.

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[SDN Protocols] Part 1 – OpenFlow Basics

Let’s get into our first topic. And what better place to start than with the protocol that arguably started the SDN madness that we’re experiencing today - OpenFlow! I got fairly carried away with writing about this protocol, and understandably so - this is a complicated topic. That’s why I’ve split this post (which is already part of a series - very meta, much deep) into two parts. This post - Part 1 - will address OpenFlow’s mid to high-level concepts, exploring what it does, why/how the idea of control plane abstraction may be useful, and some details on how hardware interaction works.

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[SDN Protocols] Part 1 – OpenFlow Basics

Let’s get into our first topic. And what better place to start than with the protocol that arguably started the SDN madness that we’re experiencing today - OpenFlow! I got fairly carried away with writing about this protocol, and understandably so - this is a complicated topic. That’s why I’ve split this post (which is already part of a series - very meta, much deep) into two parts. This post - Part 1 - will address OpenFlow’s mid to high-level concepts, exploring what it does, why/how the idea of control plane abstraction may be useful, and some details on how hardware interaction works.

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[SDN Protocols] – New Series

The networking industry in the last few years has seen an explosion in buzzwords, slide decks, new technologies, and SDN product announcements.  The honest truth is that the networking industry is still in a great state of flux, as we collectively discover what SDN means to us.

There’s a lot of new terms floating around, and what makes things even harder to keep up with, the marketing engines are alive and well – muddying the waters, and making it nearly impossible to get technical facts straight. I’m fortunate enough to know a few people that remind me that what matters most is when the rubber meets the road (which usually manifests itself in “shut up and code”).

To that end, I am kicking off a series that will be completely dedicated to explaining the various protocols and technologies you might encounter in researching SDN.

 

Who Can Use This Series?

If you’re into open source implementations, all of this will be immediately relevant. Much of what I’ll be exploring pertains to the nitty-gritty under-the-covers operation of these protocols, and will often use real-world examples rooted deeply in open source, Continue reading

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[SDN Protocols] – New Series

The networking industry in the last few years has seen an explosion in buzzwords, slide decks, new technologies, and SDN product announcements. The honest truth is that the networking industry is still in a great state of flux, as we collectively discover what SDN means to us. There’s a lot of new terms floating around, and what makes things even harder to keep up with, the marketing engines are alive and well - muddying the waters, and making it nearly impossible to get technical facts straight.

0

[SDN Protocols] – New Series

The networking industry in the last few years has seen an explosion in buzzwords, slide decks, new technologies, and SDN product announcements. The honest truth is that the networking industry is still in a great state of flux, as we collectively discover what SDN means to us. There’s a lot of new terms floating around, and what makes things even harder to keep up with, the marketing engines are alive and well - muddying the waters, and making it nearly impossible to get technical facts straight.

0

[SDN Protocols] – New Series

The networking industry in the last few years has seen an explosion in buzzwords, slide decks, new technologies, and SDN product announcements. The honest truth is that the networking industry is still in a great state of flux, as we collectively discover what SDN means to us. There’s a lot of new terms floating around, and what makes things even harder to keep up with, the marketing engines are alive and well - muddying the waters, and making it nearly impossible to get technical facts straight.

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Want Better Wi-Fi!

I talk to thousands of people every year that are wanting. They want bigger homes, more relations, bosses without attitudes, faster cars, and more powerful firearms. While a seemingly random list, one “want” at the top of almost everyone’s list...

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My Private Cloud Block Architecture Diagram

Here is a block diagram showing the functional areas in private & public cloud that I use when working with clients. I'm often explaining the full picture of cloud building especially in relation to how the network can be orchestrated to fully accelerate the cloud process. I hope you find it useful.

The post My Private Cloud Block Architecture Diagram appeared first on EtherealMind.

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VMware bug: inconsistent LACP views

There is a bug which makes LACP related views inconsistent. Latest 5.5U1 vCenter is still affected Create a LAG interface (dvSwitch -> Settings -> LACP): Now open the “Migrate network traffic to LAGs” and enable lag1 interface as standby port (Manage Distributed Port Groups -> Teaming and failover -> select the port group): Let the process […]

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NetDevOps – The Journey Begins

 

The cultural divide between delegation of network control such as in the case of Cisco ACI, or VMware’s NSX is a cause for questioning. These are off the shelf products designed to solve a problem that exists today but introduce new problems to the organisations that acquire them. Who controls the network and at what stratum(1)? In the case of automation and orchestration products, who creates the templates? Who is allowed to trigger automation and orchestration events and even more importantly, when is that person allowed to do it? As the virtual networks are virtual, does control belong with the virtualisation team? Hrmmm. Lots of questions. Many of these are dependent on the company, customer and situation and might not be solved with the most marketed product. A regimented set of answers doesn’t exist, nor do I think there will ever be out of hyper scale data centre environments.

It has taken years for the DevOps community to understand how to handle the requirement of rapid and agile deployment. We’re not the first ones to go through this pain. Can you imagine a tightly controlled ITIL governed network suddenly being comfortable with partial or fully automated approach to network Continue reading

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Omg Hotel Pennsylvania sucks

Customer service is a tradeoff you get with price, thus I'm not terribly offended by things such as that recent terrible Comcast support call. If you don't want shitty service/product, then pay more. Often simply paying 10% more yields something vastly better.

The only problem is finding those "deals".

I'm at the HopeX conference, so to make life easier, I decided to stay at the venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania. Since it's a late booking, the price was $199 a night for an "upgraded" room. The room was horrible. It was tiny, the walls in the bathroom were crumbling as the damp seeped into the concrete, the furniture was scraped and dented, and the room's one tiny window looked out onto other rooms only 20 feet away. I could bear all that -- but the "non-smoking" room stank of smoke to the point that I couldn't fall asleep. So at 1:30am I gave up and checked out.

I went two (short) blocks down to the Hotel Affinia, which cases $224 for a room that's twice the size and "upscale": everything is nice new and pretty, and this non-smoking room doesn't smell a bit like smoke. It doesn't even smell like the Continue reading

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The New Ansible Tower Command Line Tool

Today we're happy to announce a new update to Ansible Tower CLI (link) that provides near 100% coverage of all REST functions within Ansible Tower from a CLI perspective.  The CLI tool can also be imported and used as a library from other python programs.   Tower CLI is open source, under the Apache 2.0 license, so it can be easily mixed into other projects, and we're also happy to take pull requests and ideas on this project.

 

Continue reading

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802.1x on Cisco Catalyst 2950

A very short post about 802.1x (dot1x) on Cisco Catalyst 2950 series. Configure RADIUS and enable dot1x on the switch: aaa authentication dot1x default group radius aaa accounting dot1x default start-stop group radius dot1x system-auth-control Then enable dot1x on all interfaces (additional security commands are added in the example below): interface FastEthernet0/1 switchport mode access […]

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Coffee Break 12

The Coffee Break will be renamed to the "The Network Break" and will be getting its own channel on the Packet Pushers Network. But for this week, we talk about the latest news in networking and physical infrastructure.

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Coffee Break 12

The Coffee Break will be renamed to the "The Network Break" and will be getting its own channel on the Packet Pushers Network. But for this week, we talk about the latest news in networking and physical infrastructure.

The post Coffee Break 12 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Coffee Break 12

The Coffee Break will be renamed to the "The Network Break" and will be getting its own channel on the Packet Pushers Network. But for this week, we talk about the latest news in networking and physical infrastructure.

Author information

The post Coffee Break 12 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

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CCIE Bootcamp Price Reduction

INE is reducing the cost of our live, instructor-led bootcamps by $1,000 each. Our new pricing model will still include access to our workbooks and ATC video courses with the purchase , but will separate out the Lab Exam Voucher and access to our All Access Pass as optional add-ons to provide you with a more flexible options for both your learning style and your budget. If you would like the existing complete, bundled solution, you have until Aug 1 to make a bootcamp purchase.

See this advert for more details.

Look forward to seeing you in a bootcamp soon!

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Working with VMware NSX – The setup

I’ve spent some time over the last few weeks playing around with VMware’s NSX product.  In this post, I’d like to talk about getting the base NSX configuration done which we’ll build on in later posts.  However, when I say ‘base’, I don’t mean from scratch.  I’m going to start with a VMware environment that has the NSX manager and NSX controllers deployed already.  Since there isn’t a lot of ‘networking’ in getting the manager and controllers deployed, I’m not going to cover that piece.  But, if you do want to start from total scratch with NSX, see these great walk through from Chris Wahl and Anthony Burke…

Chris Wahl
http://wahlnetwork.com/2014/04/28/working-nsx-deploying-nsx-manager/
http://wahlnetwork.com/2014/05/06/working-nsx-assigning-user-permissions/
http://wahlnetwork.com/2014/06/02/working-nsx-deploying-nsx-controllers-via-gui-api/
http://wahlnetwork.com/2014/06/12/working-nsx-preparing-cluster-hosts/

Anthony Burke
http://networkinferno.net/installing-vmware-nsx-part-1
http://networkinferno.net/installing-vmware-nsx-part-2
http://networkinferno.net/installing-vmware-nsx-part-3

Both of those guys are certainly worth keeping an eye on for future NSX posts (they have other posts around NSX but I only included the ones above to get you to where I’m going to pick up).

So let’s talk about where I’m going to start from.  My topology from where I’ll start looks like this…

Note: For reference I’m going to try and use the green Continue reading