Chasing CRC Errors in a Data Center Fabric

One of my readers encountered an interesting problem when upgrading a data center fabric to 100 Gbps leaf-to-spine links:

  • They installed new fiber cables and SFPs;
  • Everything looked great… until someone started complaining about application performance problems.
  • Nothing else has changed, so the culprit must have been the network upgrade.
  • A closer look at monitoring data revealed CRC errors on every leaf switch. Obviously something was badly wrong with the whole batch of SFPs.

Fortunately my reader took a closer look at the data before they requested a wholesale replacement… and spotted an interesting pattern:

Read more …

Some Site Updates

For the last three years, the site has been largely unchanged with regard to the structure and overall function even while I continue to work to provide quality technical content. However, time was beginning to take its toll, and some “under the hood” work was needed. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent some time updating the site, and there are a few changes I wanted to mention.

  1. The site has been updated to use a much more recent version of Hugo. This change is largely invisible to readers, but a couple of the site changes are related to this upgrade. Specifically…
  2. Although the main RSS feed for the site (found here) remains a full content feed, I ran into issues getting Hugo to use my custom RSS templates for generating the category and tag feeds (for example, the RSS feed for the “Tutorial” category, or the RSS feed for the “Kubernetes” tag). You’ll now find that the category and tag feeds are summary feeds only as opposed to full content feeds. I do intend to restore them to full content feeds as soon as possible.
  3. Finally, I’ve updated the “metadata line” when viewing a single article Continue reading

The Docker Developer Guide to AWS re:Invent

This is the busiest time of the year for developers targeting AWS. Just over a week ago we announced the GA of Docker Compose for AWS, and this week we’re getting ready to virtually attend AWS re:Invent. re:Invent is the annual gathering of the entire AWS community and ecosystem to learn what’s new, get the latest tips and tricks, and connect with peers from around the world. Instead of the traditional week-long gathering of 60,000 attendees in Las Vegas, the event has pivoted to a flexible three-week online conference. This year the event is free, and anyone can participate on their own schedule. This blog post covers highlights of the event so Docker developers can get the most from re:Invent.


In the kickoff keynote by CEO Andy Jassy, AWS announced a number of new features for container developers, including a new capability, ECS Anywhere, which allows Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to run on-prem and in the cloud to support hybrid computing workloads as well as the launch of AWS Proton, an end-to-end pipeline to deliver containerized and microservices applications. Separately, AWS also announced a new public Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and gallery today. We’re excited to see a Continue reading

Tigera to Support Amazon EKS-Distro

Today, we are excited to announce our commitment to support Calico and Calico Enterprise for the Amazon EKS-Distro, a Kubernetes distribution based on and used by Amazon EKS. EKS-D enables you to create reliable and secure Kubernetes clusters using the same versions of Kubernetes and its dependencies deployed by Amazon EKS.
We view EKS-D as further confirmation of the central role that Kubernetes plays in today’s IT infrastructure. We are excited to work with Amazon on this initiative to enable EKS-D users with the same robust enterprise networking and network security functionality that you rely on today to secure your EKS cluster deployments.

Tigera’s commitment to supporting EKS-D highlights our fundamental design principle of “choice”. Our customers can choose to use Calico and Calico Enterprise with their preferred Kubernetes distribution and use the same solution to operate seamlessly across different Kubernetes distributions, including multi-cloud multi-cluster and hybrid environments. Calico Enterprise, for example, allows you to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters to define, apply, and enforce consistent networking and security policy across all your clusters from a single master cluster. Adding EKS-D clusters, which use the same underlying versions of Kubernetes deployed by Amazon EKS, as an option for our customers Continue reading

Data Center Master Classes

I’m doing a series of three master classes through Juniper on various DC fabric topics—

Join Juniper’s Russ White, a widely published 30-year network engineering veteran, in a three-part masterclass exploring the data center. Choose from classes on data center fabric, physical topologies, or data center security.

You can register here.

From the schedule—

  • Class 1: Data Center Fabric, December 2, 12 PM EST
  • Class 2: Physical Topologies, January 13, 12 PM EST
  • Class 3: Security in the Data Center, February 10, 12 PM EST

The EXPERIENCE HAS SHOWN THAT Keyword (RFC2915, Rule 4)

The world of information technology is filled, often to overflowing, with those who “know better.” For instance, I was recently reading an introduction to networking in a very popular orchestration system that began with the declaration that routing was hard, and therefore this system avoided routing. The document then went on to describe a system of moving packets around using multiple levels of Network Address Translation (NAT) and centrally configured policy-based routing (or filter-based forwarding) that was clearly simpler than the distributed protocols used to run large-scale networks. I thought, for a moment, of writing the author and pointing out the system in question had merely reinvented routing in a rather inefficient and probably broken way, but I relented. Why? Because I know RFC2915, rule 4, by heart:

Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational network.

Ultimately, the people who built this system will likely not listen to me; rather, they are going to have to experience the pain caused by large-scale failures for themselves before they will listen. Many network Continue reading

NSX-T Data Center Migration Coordinator – Modular Migration

NSX-T 3.1

For a point release, VMware NSX-T 3.1 is packed with a bunch of major features. One of these is modular migration, which is making its debut with this release. Customers had asked for an automated way to migrate just firewall rules and groups; modular migration, a new feature of Migration Coordinator, addresses exactly that request. 

What’s Migration Coordinator?  

Taking a step back, Migration Coordinator is a tool that was introduced almost 18 months ago, with NSX-T 2.4, to enable customers to migrate from NSX for vSphere to NSX-T Data Center. It’s a free tool built into NSX-T Data Center that enables customers to migrate everything — from edges, to compute, to workloads — in an automated fashion and with a workflow that is similar to an in-place upgrade on existing hardware. This model of migration is called “in-place.” 

From a resource perspective, in-place migration only needs enough resources to host NSX-T manager appliances and edges along with enough capacity per cluster to be Continue reading

Docker and AWS Resources for Developers

AWS re:Invent kicks off this week and if you are anything like us, we are super geeked out to watch and attend all the talks that are lined up for the next three weeks.

To get ready for re:Invent, we’ve gathered some of our best resources and expert guidance to get the most out of the Docker platform when building apps for AWS. Check out these blogs, webinars and DockTalks from the past few weeks to augment your re:Invent experience over the next three weeks:

Expert Guidance from the Docker Team

  • AWS Howdy Partner
    • AWS Howdy Partner Twitch Show: Back in July, I (@pmckee) was a guest on the AWS Howdy Partner show hosted on Twitch. Follow along as we walked through deploying a multi-container application to AWS ECS using the Docker CLI.

Dell launches its first all-flash object storage appliance

Dell Technologies has introduced its first all-flash object storage appliance, saying the perception that object file storage is "slow, cheap and deep" is changing as the massive growth of unstructured data makes enterprises more inclined to use high-performance storage for object-based applications.The company is adding a new appliance, called the EXF900, to the Dell EMC ECS EX-Series lineup. It claims the EXF900 has the highest performance of the ECS range of appliances, but that's because the rest of the lineup – the low-end EX300, the mid-range EX500 and high-end EX3000 arrays – are all disk based. READ MORE: Gartner's top 9 strategic technology trends for 2021To read this article in full, please click here

pygnmi 3. Usage of gNMI Capabilities.

Hello my friend,

Some time ago we’ve started sharing with you the details of pygnmi – our new open-source Python library created to simplify the management of the network elements with gNMI. The library is already almost fully operational and we want to start sharing the usage scenarios with you.



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Don’t you want to automate boring stuff?

Every job, especially network operation, has lots of routing tasks, which are boing and time consuming. Some of such tasks could be already automated in your company, but the vast majority is still waiting you. In our trainings:

  • We explain the advantages and challenges of network automation in multivendor networks (leveraging network operating systems from Cisco, Nokia, Arista, Cumulus).
  • We teach you how to reach quick wins in network automation to fuel your automation projects for a long run.
  • We covers all the details of the automation protocols, data models and teach you how to apply it in real Continue reading

Fifty Shades of High Availability

A while ago we had an interesting exchange of ideas around inserting high-availability network appliance into a public cloud environment (TL&DR: it was really hard until AWS introduced Gateway Load Balancing), and someone quickly pointed out we’re solving the wrong challenge because…

Azure Firewall […] is a fully stateful firewall-as-a-service with built-in high-availability.

Somehow he wasn’t too happy when I pointed out that there’s more to high availability than vendor marketing ;)

Read more …

Fifty Shades of High Availability

A while ago we had an interesting exchange of ideas around inserting high-availability network appliance into a public cloud environment (TL&DR: it was really hard until AWS introduced Gateway Load Balancing), and someone quickly pointed out we’re solving the wrong challenge because…

Azure Firewall […] is a fully stateful firewall-as-a-service with built-in high-availability.

Somehow he wasn’t too happy when I pointed out that there’s more to high availability than vendor marketing ;)

Read more …

Fetching Linux system details with screenfetch and neofetch

Two very useful tools for extracting essential details on your Linux system OS and hardware are screenfetch and geofetch.Each of these tools is actually a lengthy bash script that fetches the information from your system for you and presents it in an attractive manner with the distribution logo on the left and details on the right--essentially "screen shots" of your system. Neither is likely to be installed on your system by default, but each can be installed with a single command.screenfetch You can install screenfetch with sudo apt install screenfetch or sudo yum install screenfetch. Screenfetch is a script with nearly 6,500 lines. It will automatically detect your distribution and display the distribution, kernel, uptime, number of packages installed, shell you're using, overall and available disk space, CPU, GPU and memory (in use and available). It also displays an ASCII art rendition of the logo related to whatever distribution it's run on, but you can turn this off if you want to see just the list of details.To read this article in full, please click here

The Redemption Of AMD In HPC

Many of the technologists at AMD who are driving the Epyc CPU and Instinct GPU roadmaps as well as the $35 billion acquisition of FPGA maker Xilinx have long and deep experience in the high performance computing market that is characterized by the old school definition of simulation and modeling workloads running on federated or clustered systems. …

The Redemption Of AMD In HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A Python learning path for network engineers

Python programming is now a required skill for network engineers. I recorded videos of myself as I learned and practiced Python programming. I think these videos, along with the links to learning resources associated with each video’s topic, serve as a good learning guide for network engineers getting started with Python programming.

This post collects links to all ten videos I created. Over the course of these videos, I wrote a program called Usermapper that reads a configuration file and builds an XML authentication file for the Guacamole web proxy. I also used the Git version control system and posted the code in my Usermapper GitHub repository

Topics I need to learn

I learned some programming during my Electrical Engineering degree program many years ago. After I graduated, except for some basic scripting, I’ve not had to do any programming.

These videos do not cover the basics of Python. I strongly suggest you read a book about Python, or watch some video training (see suggestions below) before you start working through these videos. Before I started recording this first video, I read the O’Reilly book, Learning Python, and wrote a blog post about what I learned in the first Continue reading

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