Blog Posts in February 2012

See you @ PLNOG in Warsaw

The 8th PLNOG meeting starts in less than a week and the fantastic Andrzej Targosz has yet again kindly invited me to talk about cloud networking and data center fabrics (the first session is on Monday afternoon, the second one on Tuesday morning). I’ll be in Warsaw from Sunday evening to late Wednesday morning, so if you’d like to meet me, ask me a really tough question (layer-2 DCI is off-limits), discuss your network design, or just drink a cup of coffee or a beer with me (please don’t mention vodka), send me an e-mail and we’ll figure out where and when to meet.

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Does CCIE still make sense?

A reader of my blog sent me this question:

I am a Telecommunication Engineer currently preparing for the CCIE exam. Do you think that in a near future it will be worth to be a CCIE, due to the recent developments like Nicira? What will be the future of Cisco IOS, and protocols like OSPF or BGP? I am totally disoriented about my career.

Well, although I wholeheartedly agree with recent post from Derick Winkworth, the sky is not falling (yet):

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NEC+IBM: Enterprise OpenFlow you can actually touch

I didn’t expect we’d see multi-vendor OpenFlow deployment any time soon. NEC and IBM decided to change that and Tervela, a company specialized in building messaging-based data fabrics, decided to verify their interoperability claims. Janice Roberts who works with NEC Corporation of America helped me get in touch with them and I was pleasantly surprised by their optimistic view of OpenFlow deployment in typical enterprise networks.

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6WIND: Solving the Virtual Appliance Performance Issues

We all know that the performance of virtual networking appliances (firewalls, load balancers, routers ... running inside virtual machines) really sucks, right? Some vendors managed to offload the packet-intensive processing into the hypervisor kernel, getting way more bang for the buck, but that’s a pretty R&D-intensive undertaking.

We also know that The Real Men use The Real Hardware (ASICs and FPGAs) to get The Real Performance, right? Wrong!

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Visiting the Ivory Tower

Just before 2011 hit its expiration date, Derick Winkworth published Being Good at IT Stuff where among a gazillion things I totally agree with he also wrote “Even in IT, an IT degree is useless.

I know exactly why he wrote that; I’d attended plenty of seemingly useless lectures (although it turns out sometimes it pays to understand those topics), and some people still think teaching History of Computer Engineering or obscure programming languages makes perfect sense.

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Bandwidth-On-Demand: Is OpenFlow the Silver Bullet?

Whenever the networking industry invents a new (somewhat radical) technology, bandwidth-on-demand seems to be one of the much-touted use cases. OpenFlow/SDN is no different – Juniper used its OpenFlow implementation (Open vSwitch sitting on top of Junos SDK) to demonstrate Bandwidth Calendaring (see Dave Ward’s presentation @ OpenFlow Symposium for more details), and Dmitri Kalintsev recently bloggedHow about an ability for things like Open vSwitch ... to actually signal the transport network its connectivity requirements ... say desired bandwidth” I have only one problem with these ideas: I’ve seen them before.

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Nicira Open vSwitch Inside vSphere/ESX

I got intrigued when reading Nicira’s white paper claiming their Open vSwitch can run within vSphere/ESX hypervisor. There are three APIs that you could use to get that job done: dvFilter API (intercepting VM NIC like vCDNI does), the undocumented virtual switch API used by Cisco’s Nexus 1000v, or the device driver interface (intercepting uplink traffic). Turns out Nicira decided to use a fourth approach using nothing but publicly available APIs.

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Nicira uncloaked

Nicira, the OpenFlow startup behind the Open vSwitch, has finally dropped the stealthy cloak. Congratulations!!! Their web site is still pretty sparse on details, but you can get an initial impression of what they’re doing from a number of white papers describing Network Virtualization Platform and DVNI architecture. Short summary: I was almost right, but being a routing-and-switching bloke missed a few interesting bits – OpenFlow (and Open vSwitch) can easily combine security and forwarding functionality.

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Virtual Circuits in OpenFlow 1.0 World

Two days ago I described how you can use tunneling or labeling to reduce the forwarding state in the network core (which you have to do if you want to have reasonably fast convergence with currently-available OpenFlow-enabled switches). Now let’s see what you can do in the very limited world of OpenFlow 1.0.

OpenFlow 1.0 is obsolete, but it’s still worth noting some of the underlying technical limitations – see also RFC 1925 Rule 11.
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Easy Virtual Network (EVN) – nothing new under the sun

For whatever reason, Easy Virtual Network (EVN), a configuration sugar-glaze on top of VRF-lite (oops, multi-VRF) that has been lurking in the shadows for the last 18 months erupted into the twittersphere after Cisco’s latest switching launch. I can’t possibly understand why the implementation of a decade-old technology on mature platform (Catalyst 4500 and Catalyst 6500) makes news at the time when 40GE and 100GE interfaces were launched, but the intricacies of marketing always somehow escaped me.

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Forwarding State Abstraction with Tunneling and Labeling

Yesterday I described how the limited flow setup rates offered by most commercially-available switches force the developers of production-grade OpenFlow controllers to drop the microflow ideas and focus on state abstraction (people living in a dreamland usually go in a totally opposite direction). Before going into OpenFlow-specific details, let’s review the existing forwarding state abstraction technologies.

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