In the Business Impact of Network Automation podcast Ethan Banks asked an interesting question: “what will happen with older networking engineers who are not willing to embrace automation”

The response somewhat surprised me: Alejandro Salisas said something along the lines “they’ll be just fine” (for a while).

Let me recap his argument and add a few twists of my own:

Russ White wrote a great article along the lines of what we discussed a while ago. My favorite part:

There are companies who consider the network an asset, and companies that consider the network a necessary evil.

Enjoy!

On a tangential topic: Russ will talk about network complexity in the Building Next-Generation Data Center online course starting on April 25^th.

After introducing PowerNSX Anthony Burke illustrated how easy it is to use with a Hello, World equivalent: creating a logical switch (VXLAN segment).

You’ll need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video.

Want to know more about VMware NSX? We’ll run an NSX-focused event and a NSX Deep Dive workshop in Zurich on April 19th 2018, an overview webinar comparing NSX, ACI and EVPN on March 1st, and a deep dive in VMware NSX architecture later in 2018.

One of my readers sent me this question:

I'm in the process of researching SD-WAN solutions and have hit upon what I believe is a consistent deficiency across most of the current SD-WAN/SDx offerings. The standard "best practice" seems to be 60/180 BGP timers between the SD-WAN hub and the network core or WAN edge.

Needless to say, he wasn’t able to find BFD in these products either.

Does that matter? My reader thinks it does:

In the Network Automation 101 webinar and Building Network Automation Solutions online course I described one of the biggest challenges the networking engineers are facing today: moving from thinking about boxes and configuring individual devices to thinking about infrastructure and services, and changing data models which result in changed device configurations.

The $1B question is obviously: and how do we get from here to there?

In March 2018, we’ll continue the crazy content producing pace you’ve seen in January and February:

• We’ll have the first part of NSX, ACI or EVPN webinar on March 1st. This session will cover the basics (don’t expect too many details), a follow-up session on April 24th with Mitja Robas will go into design considerations;
• The EVPN Technical Deep Dive series with Dinesh Dutt starts on March 6th;
• Elisa and Paolo will run the final part of Network Visibility with Flow Data on March 8th;
• Last webinar in March: another installment in the leaf-and-spine saga – Multi-Pod and Multi-Site Fabrics with Lukas Krattiger on March 29th;

March is also the Troopers month. I’ll run a Hands-On Network Automation workshop there and have a motivational presentation during the main conference.

One of my readers sent me a vivid description of his interactions with one of the so-called next-generation firewall vendors. Enjoy!

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We’re using their highly promoted Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) management solution. New cutting edge software, centralized manager… but no CLI for configuration (besides some initial bootstrap commands). "You don't need that because everything is managed from our centralized manager GUI", says $vendor sales managers.

Stumbled upon a great article explaining behind-the-scene details of large analyst firms like Gartner. I guess it nicely explains my mixed feelings: on one hand I hate Gartner quotes, on the other hand I know amazing people working there that I quote all the time.

Mr. Anonymous (my most loyal reader and commentator) sent me this question as a comment to one of my blog posts:

Is there any use case of running EVPN (or PBB EVPN) in DC with MPLS Data Plane, most vendors seems to be only implementing NVO to my understanding.

Sure there is: you already have MPLS control plane and want to leverage the investment.

A while ago I was enjoying a few beers with a longtime friend of mine who happens to be running the networking team for one of the rare companies that understands how infrastructure should be built and operated.

Of course, I had to ask him what he thinks about the imminent death of CLI and all-encompassing automatic provisioning from some central orchestration system. Here’s the gist of his response:

Got an interesting microsegmentation-focused email from one of my readers. He started with:

Since every SDDC vendor is bragging about need for microsegmentation in order to protect East West traffic and how their specific products are better compared to competition, I’d like to ask your opinion on a few quick questions.

First one: does it even make sense?

Not surprisingly, every now and then I get a comment from a pushy $vendor rep who fails to mention that he works for a vendor, or that he happens to be their VP of Marketing. Here’s a gem I got late last year (no, I did not allow that comment to be published):

This is a guest blog post by Carl Buchmann, Managing Solution Consultant at TeraMach. Carl attended the Building Network Automation Solutions online course in 2017.

There is one thing I regret not doing sooner during my automation journey, and that is adopting Git and a proper IDE/text editor that has built-in source control management. I personally use Microsoft Visual Studio Code, as it has Git built in and has many great extensions to validate code syntax.

Gian Paolo Boarina wrote a blog post describing why it’s so ridiculous to see everyone excited about the latest thing Netflix (or Google or Amazon or…) managed to pull off. Absolutely worth reading.

On a similar topic: did you notice that Google started promoting clientless SSL VPN as the next great thing? RFC 1925 anyone?

PowerShell started as a tool to automate Windows servers. It was picked up by VMware (and others) as a platform on which they built their own solutions (PowerCLI and PowerNSX)… but did you know you can use it to configure data center infrastructure, including NX-OS switches, SAN networks, and Cisco UCS?

In the Configuring Data Center Devices with PowerShell video, Mitja Robas described how to do that, and provided source code for all his examples.

You’ll need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video.