The awesome Troopers crew published conference videos, including my Securing Network Automation presentation (more, including slide deck).

One of my readers was considering Dell/EMC hyperconverged solutions and sent me this question:

Just wondering if you have a chance to check out VxRail.

I read the data sheet and spec sheet, but have never seen anyone using it (any real-life experience highly welcome – please write a comment).

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.

Jordan Martin published a nice summary of what I’ve been preaching for years: centralized control plane doesn’t work (well) while controller-based network orchestration makes perfect sense.

While I totally agree with what he wrote he got the hype angle wrong:

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.

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 ;)

One of the toughest challenges you can face as a networking engineer is trying to understand what the customer really needs (as opposed to what they think they’re telling you they want).

For example, the server team comes to you saying “we need 5 VLANs between these 3 data centers”. What do you do?

Wondering how exactly routing on hosts works? Dinesh Dutt explained the details in this 10-minute video during the Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Designs webinar.

I published the third installment of the Optimize Your Data Center Infrastructure story on my main web site. In this part I’m telling you to go with 10GE and consider 25GE.

Here’s an interesting blog post (particularly as it’s coming from a well-known cloud evangelist): at the infrastructure level stability matters more than agility or speed-of-deployment. Welcome to real world ;)