There are tons of SDN workshops, academies, and webinars out there, many of them praising the almost-magic properties of the new technologies, or the shininess of vendors’ new gadgets and strategic alliances. Not surprisingly, the dirty details of real-life deployments aren’t their main focus.

As you might expect, my 2-day workshop isn’t one of them.

The workshop covers the major aspects of SDN, OpenFlow, NFV, SDDC, and overlay virtual networks, describes numerous real-life use cases (some almost a decade old), explains the benefits of SDN and SDDC, but also documents a few harsh truths including:

• Centralized control plane is an old concepts with well-known limitations;
• Numerous architectures with centralized control have failed in the past;
• OpenFlow-only solutions have significant scalability challenges;
• The state of OpenFlow support in data center switches from major vendors is depressing;
• Orchestration is the hardest part of any NFV solution;

If you’re considering an SDN pilot, or want to include SDN or NFV into your short-term network plans, you just might benefit from a realistic view of these exciting (but unfortunately overhyped) technologies.

How can I register?

Open enrollment: Some high-quality training companies will offer the workshop as part of their regular training schedule. At the moment, you can register for June 2014 workshop organized by HM Training Solutions and ERNW (the organizers of the Troopers conference) in Heidelberg, Germany.

On-site workshops: Contact me if you’d like to have an on-site workshop.

Online: Most of the material is already available in form of various SDN webinars. The webinars and the workshop materials will be eventually consistent, but it will take a while.