Matt Oswalt made two great points while tweeting about my Automation Gone Wild blog post:

• Automation should be a strategy. You need management buy-in;
• You should have at least one person with strong software development experience in your automation team.

However, life is not always rosy, so @stupidengineer asked:

I love listening to Scott Lowe’s Full Stack Journey podcast, so I was totally delighted when he asked me to participate. The results: FSJ Episode#8. Enjoy!

While most readers, commenters, and Twitterati agreed with my take on the uselessness of OSPF areas and inter-area summarization in the 21st century, a few of them pointed out that in practice, the theory and practice are not the same. Unfortunately, most counterexamples failed due to broken implementations or vendor “optimizations.”

Does it make sense to run OpenStack on top of VMware infrastructure? How well does NSX work as a Neutron plug-in? Marcos Hernandez answered these questions (and a lot of others) in the Episode 61 of Software Gone Wild (admittedly after a short marketing pitch in the first 10 minutes).

One of my readers left this question on the blog post resurfacing the idea of running BGP between servers and ToR switches:

When using BGP on a VM for mobility, what is the best way to establish a peer relationship with a new TOR switch after a live migration? The VM won't inherently know the peer address or the ASN.

As always, the correct answer is it depends.

Marcel Reuter sent me a few questions about my upcoming Network Automation workshop. You might find them interesting, so here they are:

We have a lab with virtual IOS-XE, IOS-XR and Junos (vMX) router. I would like to learn how to provisioning the Lab router.

Covered in the workshop. I’m focusing on vIOS (which is pretty close to IOS Classic and IOS-XE) and Nexus OS because that’s what I can get up and running quickly in VIRL.

One of my ExpertExpress design discussions focused on WAN network design and the need for OSPF areas and summarization (the customer had random addressing and the engineers wondered whether it makes sense to renumber the network to get better summarization).

I was struggling with the question of whether we still need OSPF areas and summarization in 2016 for a long time. Here are my thoughts on the topic; please share yours in the comments.

In the Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Designs webinar series we started with the simplest possible design: non-redundant server connectivity with bridging within a ToR switch and routing across the fabric.

After I explained the basics (including routing protocol selection, route summarization, link aggregation and addressing guidelines), Dinesh Dutt described how network architects use BGP when building leaf-and-spine fabrics.

Eluehike Chedu asked an interesting question after my explanation of why stretched ACI fabric (or alternatives, see below) is the least horrible way of stretching a subnet: What about OTV?

Time to go back to the basics. As Dinesh Dutt explained in our Routing on Hosts webinar, there are (at least) three reasons why people want to see stretched subnets:

One of my readers sent me this question:

Have you written something about assessment and planning for migration of traditional in-premise data center network to private or public cloud? There would be hundreds of things to check during assessment and then plan accordingly.

Academically, that’s a wrong way of approaching the problem.