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Distributed virtual and physical routing in VMware NSX for vSphere

This post is intended to be a primer on the distributed routing in VMware NSX for vSphere, using a basic scenario of L3 forwarding between both virtual and physical subnets. I’m not going to bore you with all of the laborious details, just the stuff that matters for the purpose of this discussion.

In VMware NSX for vSphere there are two different types of NSX routers you can deploy in your virtual network.

• The NSX Edge Services Router (ESR)
• The NSX Distributed Logical Router (DLR)

Both the ESR and DLR can run dynamic routing protocols, or not. They can just have static/default routes if you like. The ESR is a router in a VM (it also does other L4-L7 services like FW, LB, NAT, VPN, if you want). Both the control and data plane of the ESR router are in the VM. This VM establishes routing protocol sessions with other routers and all of the traffic flows through this VM. It’s like a router, but in a VM. This should be straight forward, not requiring much explanation.

The ESR is unique because it’s more than a just router. It’s also a feature rich firewall, load balancer, Continue reading

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Distributed virtual and physical routing in VMware NSX for vSphere

This post is intended to be a primer on the distributed routing in VMware NSX for vSphere, using a basic scenario of L3 forwarding between both virtual and physical subnets. I’m not going to bore you with all of the laborious details, just the stuff that matters for the purpose of this discussion. In VMware NSX for vSphere there are two different types of NSX routers you can deploy in […]

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Preventing Information Overload

Man, did I pick a tumultuous time to start a career in technology - there are so many great debates going on right now, with vendors working around the clock churning out new products for the general populace to chew on and talk about. I’m becoming more and more involved with the community nowadays, and top of that, I’m a big nerd to start with. So it’s easy for me to suffer from information overload, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t happen just about every week.

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Preventing Information Overload

Man, did I pick a tumultuous time to start a career in technology - there are so many great debates going on right now, with vendors working around the clock churning out new products for the general populace to chew on and talk about. I’m becoming more and more involved with the community nowadays, and top of that, I’m a big nerd to start with. So it’s easy for me to suffer from information overload, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t happen just about every week.

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Cisco vs. Juniper &#8211 Advertising Inactive Routes into BGP

This post represents the solution and explanation for quiz-17. For some temporary period of time, during network transition, your network consists both on Cisco and Juniper routers for the same role. You will see that they behave differently when it comes to advertising inactive BGP Routes.

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The New Face of the Access Layer

The role, and the features of the access layer in the datacenter has changed dramatically in such a short time. Prior to virtualization, the DC access layer was still relatively simple. Now that the majority of workloads are virtualized, we’re seeing some pretty crazy shifts. Many simple network functions like routing and security, as well as some advanced functions like load balancing are moving into software. This follows the general best practice of applying policy as close to the edge of your network as possible.

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The New Face of the Access Layer

The role, and the features of the access layer in the datacenter has changed dramatically in such a short time. Prior to virtualization, the DC access layer was still relatively simple. Now that the majority of workloads are virtualized, we’re seeing some pretty crazy shifts. Many simple network functions like routing and security, as well as some advanced functions like load balancing are moving into software. This follows the general best practice of applying policy as close to the edge of your network as possible.

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The definitve guide to setting up a USB Serial adapter and iTerm2 on OSX

Using a few guides on the web and a little bit of ingenuity I was able to get my FTDI-based, USB to 2x Serial adapter working in Mac OSX 10.9 Mavericks with iTerm 2. This post documents the process and resources used in the hope of becoming the definitive guide to setting up a USB serial adapter in OSX and using iTerm2 as the terminal emulator. Even if it isn’t quite definitive, it should at least be useful to others - I hope!

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The definitve guide to setting up a USB Serial adapter and iTerm2 on OSX

Using a few guides on the web and a little bit of ingenuity I was able to get my FTDI-based, USB to 2x Serial adapter working in Mac OSX 10.9 Mavericks with iTerm 2. This post documents the process and resources used in the hope of becoming the definitive guide to setting up a USB serial adapter in OSX and using iTerm2 as the terminal emulator. Even if it isn’t quite definitive, it should at least be useful to others - I hope!

Choose your weapon

The dual serial adapter above is my weapon of choice. You can pick one up for about £20 on Amazon(not an affiliate link). Generally speaking, I’ve had better experience with FTDI chipsets so if you are in the market for an adapter, I’d recommend checking the chipset first…

Driver Installation

For FTDI

1. Download the FTDI VCP driver for OSX
2. Install the drivers

For Prolific

1. Download the drivers from here
2. Install the drivers

A quick note on terminal emulation in OSX

Most likely you have used a USB-serial adapter in Windows. When installed It appears as a COM port, you point TeraTerm or HyperTerminal to that COM port and everything automagically works. In Continue reading

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BeagleBone Black replaced Raspberry PI running networkgeekstuff.com (and performance reasons review)

For best article visual quality, open BeagleBone Black replaced Raspberry PI running networkgeekstuff.com (and performance reasons review) directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

With Raspberry PI, a very great microPC platform that started a trend of its own with two million RasberyPIs sold, a new market has emerged calling for microPC segment companies to compete. One of such alternative companies is BeagleBone and their very nice product is BeagleBone Black. So in this article, I would like to present the BeagleBone Black with some quick view on its abilities and because one BeagleBone Black has arrived to me a while ago, I can compare it with my older Raspberries. And most importantly, why the performance was so good that this web has moved to BeagleBone Black and abandoned Raspberries (while old Raspberries are now only as cold backup).

If you remember from my previous blogposts, RasberryPI is a platform on which actually this webserver is running during writing of this article (and you can read about building web server load-balanced on two RasberryPIs on in my previous tutorial articles). So I really found myself a useful work for my RaspberryPIs and I am from that point very Continue reading

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Complexity Concerns Temper SDN’s Promise According to Packet Design Survey

Perceived benefits propelling adoption but management issues worry service providers

MPLS/SDN 2013 International Conference, WASHINGTON, D.C. – Nov. 20, 2013 – Network service providers are buying into software defined networking (SDN) benefits but are troubled by the management challenges, according to a survey conducted by Packet Design yesterday. More than 100 organizations – nearly half comprised of service providers – weighed in on SDN adoption, business drivers, and concerns during the 16th annual MPLS/SDN International Conference in Washington, D.C.

Nearly All Examining or Deploying SDN

Almost 90 percent of organizations surveyed are exploring SDN in some way, with:

• 62 percent either researching or prototyping SDN;
• 19 percent with some production deployment;and another
• 8 percent planning to implement production SDN in either 2014 or 2015.

Only 11 percent said they have no current SDN plans.

Main Drivers Include New Services, Business Agility

Nearly half of survey respondents (43 percent) said the main business driver behind SDN in their organizations is supporting new services such as cloud, big data applications, and mobility. More than 26 percent consider increasing business agility (including responding faster to new network demands) the number one driver. Improving productivity (better network availability and performance for customers/users) Continue reading

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Data Edge Launches New Telecoms Performance Management Tool

Data Edge has launched a new telecoms performance management tool that it forecasts will bring in new revenues of €1.2m before the end of 2014. This includes a first contract just signed with a major telecommunications provider in Ireland worth €350,000. According to Data Edge, the management of network operations for telecommunications companies has become increasingly complicated. Constant network configuration changes, and the rollout and expansion of new services, have made complete network visibility extremely difficult. Data Edge therefore saw a gap in the market and teamed up with Packet Design to provide a solution for telecoms providers to improve network reporting, route visibility, analysis and diagnosis.

Data Edge has entered into an exclusive partnership with Packet Design to resell its product range in the Irish market. “To gain real insight into networks, engineers traditionally have had to query individual routers and manually correlate the resulting data, which is a tedious, error prone and time consuming process,” said Brian McBride, managing director, Data Edge. “SLA reporting, capacity planning, route visibility, fault finding, repairing and auditing are constant uphill struggles. Add cloud computing and virtualisation into the mix and these tasks become practically impossible. Operators told us they want a Continue reading

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The definitve guide to setting up a USB Serial adapter and iTerm2 on OSX

Using a few guides on the web and a little bit of ingenuity I was able to get my FTDI-based, USB to 2x Serial adapter working in Mac OSX 10.9 Mavericks with iTerm 2. This post documents the process and resources used in the hope of becoming the definitive guide to setting up a USB serial adapter in OSX and using iTerm2 as the terminal emulator. Even if it isn’t quite definitive, it should at least be useful to others - I hope!

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Mass ESXi Deployment using Auto Deploy, Boot from SAN, and PowerShell

I recently had a need to deploy quite a few ESXi hosts on top of Cisco UCS B-Series blades (60+) back-ended by Netapp storage. I needed some kind of method to do this quickly so that I didn’t have to spend days just installing ESXi. Here were some of the design guidelines: Needed an ESXi 5.5 installation with the Cisco enic and fnic drivers installed, as well as the Cisco 1000v VEM module

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Mass ESXi Deployment using Auto Deploy, Boot from SAN, and PowerShell

I recently had a need to deploy quite a few ESXi hosts on top of Cisco UCS B-Series blades (60+) back-ended by Netapp storage. I needed some kind of method to do this quickly so that I didn’t have to spend days just installing ESXi. Here were some of the design guidelines: Needed an ESXi 5.5 installation with the Cisco enic and fnic drivers installed, as well as the Cisco 1000v VEM module

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Network Virtualization and the End-to-End Principle

[This post was written by Dinesh Dutt with help from Martin Casado.  Dinesh is Chief Scientist at Cumulus Networks. Before that, he was a Cisco Fellow, working on various data center technologies from ASICs to protocols to RFCs. He’s a primary co-author on the TRILL RFC and the VxLAN draft at the IETF.  Sudeep Goswami, Shrijeet Mukherjee, Teemu Koponen, Dmitri Kalintsev, and T. Sridhar provided useful feedback along the way.]

In light of the seismic shifts introduced by server and network virtualization, many questions pertaining to the role of end hosts and the networking subsystem have come to the fore. Of the many questions raised by network virtualization, a prominent one is this: what function does the physical network provide in network virtualization? This post considers this question through the lens of the end-to-end argument.

Networking and Modern Data Center Applications

There are a few primary lessons learnt from the large scale data centers run by companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. The first such lesson is that a physical network built on L3 with equal-cost multipathing (ECMP) is a good fit for the modern data center. These networks provide predictable latency, scale well, converge quickly when nodes or links change, and provide Continue reading

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Show 168 – Juniper QFX5100 & Virtual Chassis Fabric – Sponsored

Juniper Network’s Doug Hanks & Satish Surapaneni join Juniper customer (and Kool-Aid drinking fanboy) Kurt Bales in a discussion about the newly announced QFX5100 line of switches with Ethan Banks & Greg Ferro. Along the way, we talk about useful new technologies enabled by the QFX5100, such Virtual Chassis Fabric & TISSU. This is one of […]

Author information

The post Show 168 – Juniper QFX5100 & Virtual Chassis Fabric – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

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Cashing in on Hotspot 2.0

Nothing is hotter right now in the networked world than Hotspot 2.0. While most of the attention on Hotspot 2.0 has centered on the technology and how it works, the really compelling “feature”(that has received nearly no attention) is the...

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‘Hello world’ for network engineers exploring Hadoop

It is hard to ignore all of the hype around Hadoop and Big Data these days. Like most infrastructure engineers, we tend to focus on how to build highly-available, highly-scalable networks – and I’m no exception. However, it is still important to me to keep up with and implement projects on popular trends, directly infrastructure […]

Author information

The post ‘Hello world’ for network engineers exploring Hadoop appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by JR Mayberry.

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Stahp it with the Network programmer FUD already

Every week I see somebody ask “will all Network Engineers be programmers” on Twitter, LinkedIn, at a trade show or just to be antagonistic and for no other reason than to start an argument.

The anger inside has been brewing for over 12 months until the pressure valve finally released in the form of this blog post. Expect snark.