Category: Bridging

A while ago, a tweet praising the wonders of 802.1BR piqued my curiosity. I couldn’t resist downloading the latest draft and spending a few hours trying to decipher IEEE language (as far as the IEEE drafts go, 802.1BR is highly readable) ... and it was déjà vu all over again.

Short summary: 802.1BR is repackaged and enhanced 802.1Qbh (or the standardized version of VM-FEX). There’s nothing fundamentally new that would have excited me.

I often get three questions about TRILL: Are the TRILL standards finalized? Has anyone implemented it? Is it useful?

Short answers: Yes, No, Maybe (although I remain unconvinced).

Every time I rant about large-scale bridging and stretched L2 subnets, someone inevitably points out that Carrier (or Metro) Ethernet works perfectly fine using the same technologies and principles.

I won’t spend any time on the “perfectly fine” part, but focus on the fundamental difference between the two: the use case.

This topic has been on my to-write list for over a year and its working title was phrased as a question, but all the horror stories you’ve shared with me over the last year or so (some of them published in my blog) have persuaded me that there’s no question – it’s a fact.

If you think I’m rephrasing the same topic ad nauseam, you’re right, but every month or so I get an external trigger that pushes me back to the same discussion, this time an interesting comment thread on Massimo Re Ferre’s blog.

I usually use the “Nicira is Skype of virtual networking” analogy when describing the differences between Nicira’s NVP and traditional VLAN-based implementations. Cade Metz liked it so much he used it in his What Is a Virtual Network? It’s Not What You Think It Is article, so I guess a blog post is long overdue.

Before going into more details, you might want to browse through my Cloud Networking Scalability presentation (or watch its recording) – the crucial slide is this one:

Stephen Hauser sent me an interesting question after the Data Center fabric webinar I did with Abner Germanow from Juniper:

A common theme in your talks is that L2 does not scale. Do you mean that Transparent (Learning) Bridging does not scale due to its flooding? Or is there something else that does not scale?

As is oft the case, I’m not precise enough in my statements, so let’s fix that first:

Vasilis sent me an interesting campfire story. It started with a common mistake:

An external partner of my company used an Ethernet cable and connected two switchport interfaces of one of our access switches .

Being a conscientious networking engineer, he had the usual safeguards in place ...

Anton sent me an interesting question:

Most IP phones have a network facing port and a port for user to connect the PC. Today a user plugged in both of these ports into the switch. It looks like phone filters out BPDUs, so the switch did not catch this loop. Do you know of a feature or design that would be able to catch/prevent this type of event?

My answer would be “no, there’s nothing you can do if you have a broken device that acts like a STP-less switch” but you know I’m not a switching or IP telephony guru. Any ideas?

An engineer attending my VMware Networking Deep Dive webinar has asked me a tough question that I was unable to answer:

What happens if a VM running within a vSphere host sends a BPDU? Will it get dropped by the vSwitch or will it be sent to the physical switch (potentially triggering BPDU guard)?

I got the answer from visibly harassed Kurt (@networkjanitor) Bales during the Networking Tech Field Day; one of his customers has managed to do just that.

Update 2011-11-04: The post was rewritten based on extensive feedback from Cisco, VMware and numerous readers.

A few weeks ago I delivered a short L2 DCI WebEx presentation to CCIE Club Poland. I took the L2 part of my Data Center Interconnect webinar and added 15 minutes of L2 DCI mythbusting.

That part of my presentation is on YouTube; for the rest, watch my Data Center Interconnect webinar.