Blog Posts in December 2013

That’s it for 2013

12 months, 260 blog posts, and a dozen of webinars … and it’s time for another end-of-year post. It’s amazing how quickly a year goes by when you have fun.

I’d like to thank you for your insightful comments, great questions you asked, and wonderful challenges you keep sending me … and special thanks to all of you who trusted me enough to buy my webinars or decided to rely on my professional judgment.

Don’t forget to shut down your pagers and smartphones (if at all possible), and enjoy the simpler (and less stressful) life with the loved ones. Have a great holiday season and all the best (including plenty of SDN fun) in the coming year!

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Does It Make Sense to Build New Clouds with Overlay Networks?

TL&DR Summary: It depends on your business model

With the explosion of overlay virtual networking solutions (with every single reasonably-serious vendor having at least one) one might get the feeling that it doesn't make sense to build greenfield IaaS cloud networks with VLANs. As usual, there's significant difference between theory and practice.

You should always consider the business requirements before launching on a technology crusade. IaaS networking solutions are no exception.

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Focus on Your Business, Not Fancy Technologies

After my Clouds, Overlays and SDN: What really matters keynote presentation @ MENOG 12 a few attendees asked me for a recording; one of them said “I want everyone in my organization to watch it.” Alas, wishes don’t always come true: the video team was streaming the presentations, but not recording them.

Fortunately I had the same presentation @ PLNOG 11 and like always the PLNOG organizers did a marvelous job. The video has just been posted on YouTube. Enjoy!

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Internet Traffic Gets MPLS Labels When You Deploy MPLS/VPN

A good friend of mine sent me an interesting question:

When I configure mpls ip on an interface, will all packets on that interface be labeled, or just the MPLS/VPN packets received through VRFs? I always assumed that stuff in the global routing table just got forwarded as IP packets without any labels.

Well, that’s not how MPLS works (at least not in its default incarnation on Cisco IOS).

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Packet Forwarding in Amazon VPC

Packet forwarding behavior of VMware NSX and Hyper-V Network Virtualization is well documented; no such documentation exists for Amazon VPC. However, even though Amazon uses a proprietary solution (heavily modified Xen hypervisor with homemade virtual switch), it’s pretty easy to figure out the basics from the observed network behavior and extensive user documentation.

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Layer-2 Gateways in VMware NSX

Gateways between overlay virtual world and (VLAN-based) physical reality are a crucial component in every design using overlay virtual networks. Ideally one could use virtual appliances, but sometimes the users keep asking for layer-2 gateways.

The VMware NSX Layer-2 Gateways video from the VMware NSX Architecture webinar describes the use cases for layer-2 gateways and the VMware NSX implementations.

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OMG, Who Will Manage All Those Virtual Firewalls?

Every time I talk about small (per-application) virtual appliances, someone inevitably criesAnd who will manage thousands of appliances?” Guess what – I’ve heard similar cries from the mainframe engineers when we started introducing Windows and Unix servers. In the meantime, some sysadmins manage more than 10.000 servers, and we’re still discussing the “benefits” of humongous monolithic firewalls.

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