I carried out an interesting quiz during one of my Interop workshop:

• How many use Linux-based servers? Almost everyone raised their hands;
• How many use Apache or Tomcat web servers? Yet again, almost everyone.
• How many run applications written in PHP, Python, Ruby…? Same crowd (probably even a bit more).
• How many use Nginx, Squid or HAProxy for load balancing? Very few.

Is there a rational explanation for this seemingly nonsensical result?

A while ago I had an interesting discussion with a fellow SDN explorer, in which I came to a conclusion that it makes no sense to insert an overlay virtual networking SDN controller between cloud orchestration system and virtual switches. As always, I missed an important piece of the puzzle: federation of cloud instances.

2014-11-04 16:48Z: CJ Williams sent me an email with information on SDN controller in upcoming Windows Server release. Thank you!

It doesn’t make sense to build a new data center network to support legacy bare-metal server infrastructure. You’ll have to use relatively expensive 1G/10G ports to be able to connect the current and future servers, and once the server and virtualization engineers wake up and do hardware refresh you’ll end up with way too many ports (oh, and you do know that transceivers could cost more than the switching hardware, right?).

It was a dark and stormy Halloween night and a networking engineer was stuck in a data center facing a Mission Impossible project: replace a failing Cat6500 with a brand-new Nexus 7000. Shouldn’t have been a problem, if only the cables were labeled.

If you listen to the marketing departments of overlay virtual networking vendors, it looks like the world is a simple place: you deploy their solution on top of any IP fabric, and it all works.

You’ll hear a totally different story from the physical hardware vendors: they’ll happily serve you a healthy portion of FUD, hoping you swallow it whole, and describe in gory details all the mishaps you might encounter on your virtualization quest.

The funny thing is they’re all right (not to mention the really fun part when FUDders change sides ;).

This post SHOULD have been published on April 1st, but I need to define the terminology for another upcoming post, so here it is ;)

RFC 2119 defines polite words to use when something really shouldn’t be done. Some network designs I see deserve more colorful terminology.

2014-11-02: Updated with reference to RFC 6919 (/HT to @LapTop006)

A year ago Matthew Stone first heard about Cumulus Linux when I ranted about it on a Packet Pushers podcast (which only proves that any publicity is good publicity even though some people thought otherwise at that time), and when his cloud service provider company started selecting ToR switches he considered Cumulus together with Cisco and Arista… and chose Cumulus.

In the third part of MPLS Tech Talks, we focused on the role of label distribution protocol (LDP) and its operation in frame-mode MPLS.

More than a year ago I wrote a response to a comment Pascal wrote on my Predicting the IPv6 BGP table size blog post. I recently rediscovered it and figured out that it’s (unfortunately) as relevant as it was almost 18 months ago.

Other people have realized we have this problem in the meantime, and are still being told to stop yammering because the problem is not real. Let’s see what happens in a few years.

Every time I’m running a classroom version of my Designing the Cloud Infrastructure workshop, I start with a simple question: “Who has more than 2000 VMs or bare-metal servers in the data center?”

I might see three hands on a good day; 90-95% of the audience have smaller data centers… and some of them get disappointed when I tell them they don’t need more than two ToR switches in their data center.

During his Network Programmability 101 webinar Matt Oswalt described three phases of network programmability. The first level in the pyramid of programmable awesomeness (his words, not mine) is described in today’s video.

The discussion in the comments to my LAG versus ECMP post took a totally unexpected turn when someone mentioned BFD failure detection over port channels (link aggregation groups – LAGs).

What’s the big deal?

Want to know what the difference between Virtual Chassis and Virtual Chassis Fabric is? How Local Link Bias works? How ISSU on QFX 5100 works even though the box doesn’t have two supervisor boards? You’ll find answers to all these questions in new videos describing Juniper data center switches.

People talking about long-distance workload mobility and cloudbursting often forget the physical reality documented in the fallacies of distributed computing. Today we’ll focus on bandwidth, in a follow-up blog post we’ll deal with its ugly cousin latency.

TL&DR summary: If you plan to spread application components across the network without understanding their network requirements, you’ll get the results you deserve.

Several SDN solutions that coexist with the traditional control- and data planes instead of ripping them out and replacing them with the new awesomesauce use BGP to modify the network’s forwarding behavior.

Border6 decided to turn that concept into a commercial product that we dissected in Episode 12 of Software Gone Wild podcast.

Enjoy the show (this time in video format).