During Cisco Live Europe (huge thanks to Tech Field Day crew for bringing me there) I had a chat with Jeff McLaughlin about NETCONF support on Cisco IOS XE, in particular on the campus switches.

We started with the obvious question “why would someone want to have NETCONF on a campus switch”, continued with “why would you use NETCONF and not REST API”, and diverted into “who loves regular expressions”. Teasing aside, we discussed:

I’m running a hyperconverged infrastructure event with Mitja Robas on April 6th, and so my friend Christoph Jaggi sent me a list of interesting questions, starting with:

What are hyperconverged infrastructures?

The German version of the interview is published on inside-it.ch.

Imagine a Flatworld in which railways are the main means of transportation. They were using horses and pigeons in the past, and experimenting with underwater airplanes, but railways won because they were cheaper than anything else (for whatever reason, price always wins over quality or convenience in that world).

As always, there were multiple railroad tracks and trains manufacturers, and everyone tried to use all sorts of interesting tricks to force the customers to buy tracks and trains from the same vendor. Different track gauges and heptagonal wheels that worked best with grooved rails were the usual tricks.

Niki Vonderwell kindly invited me to Troopers 2017 and I decided to talk about security and reliability aspects of network automation.

The presentation is available on my web site, and I’ll post the link to the video when they upload it. An extended version of the presentation will eventually become part of Network Automation Use Cases webinar.

The last presentation during the Tech Field Day Extra @ Cisco Live Europe event was a Cisco-Apple Partnership presentation, and we expected an hour of corporate marketese.

Can’t tell you how pleasantly surprised we were when Jerome Henry started his very technical presentation explaining the wireless goodies you get when using iOS with IOS.

Just FYI: a week after I wrote this (don't forget to go through the comments), VMware made it official:

…we’ve found that VMware’s native virtual switch implementation has become the de facto standard for greater than 99% of vSphere customers today. … Moving forward, VMware will have a single virtual switch strategy that focuses on two sets of native virtual switch offerings – VMware vSphere® Standard Switch and vSphere Distributed Switch™ for VMware vSphere, and the Open virtual switch (OVS).

During the Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Designs webinar Roger Lapuh from Avaya explained how Avaya uses SPB technology to build an L2+L3 fabric.

Ansible network modules (at least in the way they’re implemented in Ansible releases 2.1 and 2.2) were one of the more confusing aspects of my Building Network Automation Solutions online course (and based on what I’m seeing on various chat sites we weren’t the only ones).

I wrote an in-depth explanation of how you’re supposed to be using them a while ago and now updated it with user authentication information.

One of the engineers watching my Data Center 3.0 webinar asked me why we need session stickiness in load balancing, what its impact is on load balancer performance, and whether we could get rid of it. Here’s the whole story from the networking perspective.

Remember the All You Need Are Two Switches saga? Several readers told me they’d like to have in text (article) format, so I found a transcription service, and started editing what they produced and publishing it. The first two installments are already online.

On a related topic: we’ll discuss the viability of this approach in April DIGS event in Zurich, Switzerland.