Andrew Lerner, my favorite Gartner blogger, published a great article documenting common SDN misconceptions. Not surprisingly, they're pretty much in line with what I've been ranting about for the last few years (including Whitebox Switching Is not SDN). Enjoy!

VM NIC firewalls have been around for years (they’re also the reason I got my first invitation to the awesome Troopers conference), but it sounds so much better when you call them Microsegmentation (not the one I talked about @ Troopers this year).

Marketing gimmicks aside, VMware NSX includes an interesting in-kernel stateful firewall, and Brad Hedlund was kind enough to explain the intricacies of that feature in Episode 27 of Software Gone Wild

Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) protocol is well hidden deep in the bowels of IPv6 protocol stack and most of us tend to gloss over it when we discuss IPv6 neighbor discovery process… until MLD raises its ugly head to bite an unsuspecting network administrator.

The problems with MLD are not new (and I wrote exhaustively about them a while ago), but it’s always nice to see other people raise awareness of broken IPv6 features like Enno Rey and his security team did during the IPv6 Security Summit (part of Troopers 15 conference).

Amazon Web Services was (AFAIK) one of the first products that introduced availability zones – islands of infrastructure that are isolated enough from each other to stop the propagation of failure or outage across their boundaries.

Not surprisingly, multiple availability zones shouldn’t rely on a central controller (as Amazon found out a few years back), and there are only few SDN controller vendors that are flexible enough to meet this requirement. For more details, watch the free Availability Zones video on my web site (part of Scaling Overlay Virtual Networking webinar).

A few weeks ago HP announced that they’d start selling branded whitebox (brite-box) switches, and as expected the industry press was immediately full of opinions. As always, it makes sense to follow the money (or, in this case, the R&D budget) to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.

A few days after the Networking Field Day 9 event Nick Buraglio organized a virtual meetup with Brandon Carroll, Brandon Mangold, Bob McCouch and myself, and we discussed the presentations from NEC, Cumulus, Cisco and Brocade. Nick recorded the conversation and so Episode 26 of Software Gone Wild was born.

Just in case you're new to IPv6 and struggle with the essentials: here's an excellent cheat sheet by Jeff Carrell… and don't forget to check the amazing Cheat Sheet Library @ packetlife.net.

The fantastic Troopers 15 conference is in full swing… and I’m done with the presentations ;) The last talk I had during the conference focused on automating network security. The slides are already online; I’ll add the link to the recording when they upload the videos.

Christoph Jaggi, the author of Metro Ethernet and Carrier Ethernet Encryption Market Overview published an awesome follow-up document: an evaluation guide that lists most of the gotchas one has to be aware of when considering encryption gear, from deployment scenarios, network overhead and key exchange details to operational considerations. If you have to deal with any aspect of network encryption, this document is a must-read.

I had a great SDN-focused conversation with Terry Slattery during last Interop New York, ago and of course we came to the argument that the CLI is the root of all evil, which started my usual rant. Guess what: not surprisingly that wasn’t what Terry had in mind. He was using the “CLI mentality is bad” as a synonym for “we’re used to configuring our networks one box at a time” (so we should really be talking about box-focused mentality).