Blog Posts in April 2017

Salt and SaltStack on Software Gone Wild

Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Git, GitLab… the list of tools you can supposedly use to automate your network is endless, and there’s a new kid on the block every few months.

In Episode 77 of Software Gone Wild we explored Salt, its internal architecture, and how you can use it with Mircea Ulinic, a happy Salt user/contributor working for Cloudflare, and Seth House, developer @ SaltStack, the company behind Salt.

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Update: VMware NSX in Redundant L3-only Data Center Fabric

Short update for those that read the original blog post: it turns out that the answer to the question “Is it possible to run VMware NSX on redundantly-connected hosts in a pure L3 data center fabric?” is still NO.

VTEPs from different ESXi hosts can be in different subnets, but while a single ESXi host might have multiple VTEPs, the only supported way to use them is to put them in the same subnet. I removed the original blog post.

A huge thank you to everyone who pushed me with their comments and emails to find the correct answer.

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Mini-RSA in Zurich, NSX, ACI, Automation…

I’ll be doing several on-site workshops in the next two months. Here’s a brief summary of where you could meet me in person.

A bit of manual geolocation first: if you’re from Europe, check out the first few entries, if you’re from US, there’s important information for you at the bottom, and if you don’t want to travel Europe or US, there’s an online course starting in September ;)

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Network Automation Is Much More than Configuration Management

Most network automation presentations you can find on the Internet focus on configuration management, either to provision new boxes, or to provision new services, so it’s easy to assume that network automation is really a fancy new term for consistent device configuration management.

However, as I explained in the Network Automation 101 webinar, there’s so much more you can do and today I’d like to share a real-life example from Jaakko Rautanen, an alumni of my Building Network Automation Solutions online course.

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Let’s Drop Some Random Commands, Shall We?

One of my readers sent me a link to CCO documentation containing (at that time) this gem:

Beginning with Cisco NX-OS Release 7.0(3)I2(1), Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches handle the CLI configuration actions in a different way than before the introduction of NX-API and DME. The NX-API and DME architecture introduces a delay in the communication between Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches and the end host terminal sessions, for example SSH terminal sessions.

So far so good. We can probably tolerate some delay. However, the next sentence is a killer…

2017-05-08: The behavior is caused by an old bug in Linux TTY driver. Fixed NX-OS versions are planned to be shipped in late May 2017. More details here.

2017-04-05: The wonderful information disappeared from Cisco's documentation within 24 hours with no explanation whatsoever. However, I expected that and took a snapshot of that page before publishing the blog post ;)
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