Category: cloud

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 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.

Let’s continue our journey toward two-switch data center. What can we do after virtualizing the workload, getting rid of legacy technologies, and reducing the number of server uplinks to two?

How about replacing dedicated storage boxes with distributed file system?

In late September, Howard Marks will talk about software-defined storage in my Building Next Generation Data Center course. The course is sold out, but if you register for the spring 2017 session, you’ll get access to recording of Howard’s talk.

One of my ExpertExpress engagements focused on networking in a future private cloud that might be built using OpenStack. The customer planned to deploy multiple data centers, and I recommended that they do everything they can to make sure they don’t make them a single failure domain.

Next step: translate that requirement into OpenStack terms.

A month ago I published the video where I described the idea that “two switches is all you need in a medium-sized data center”. Now let’s dig into the details: the first step you have to take to optimize your data center infrastructure is to virtualize all servers.

For even more details, watch the Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure webinar, or register for the Building Next-Generation Data Center course.

After I told you that I’m not going to Interop, I got numerous emails along the lines of “but I was really looking forward to attending your workshop” so I started looking for a solution that would combine the best of online and classroom worlds.

Here’s my first attempt: an interactive online course combining topics from two of my Interop workshops. I’m still working on the detailed agenda and plan to have it ready around May 1st. In the meantime, I’d really appreciate your feedback – leave a comment or send me an email.

I’ve been telling you to build small-to-midsized data center with two switches for years ;) A few weeks ago I’ve turned the presentation I had on that topic into a webinar and the first video from that webinar (now part of Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure) is already public.

Everyone talks about public or hybrid clouds, whitebox switching with home-grown networking operating system, or SDN nirvana, but whenever I talk with enterprise-focused architects, consultants or vendor SEs, I see a totally different story.

Here's a typical response I'm getting from engineers in this group: “I work with multinational financial customers, and in this group hybrid cloud is not even a topic. They do private cloud projects, with some of them looking into public cloud deployments of isolated projects on base AWS functionality.”

I was asked to present a data-center-related talk last week and decided to focus on one of my favorite topics: because most people don’t have more than a few hundred servers in their data center, they don’t need more than two switches (or a rack of servers).

Not surprisingly, an equipment reseller sitting in the room was not amused.

The video and the slide deck are already online, but there’s a minor challenge: the whole event was in Slovenian ;) However, I plan to record the same topic in English once my SDN travels stop.

During one of my SDN workshops, an attendees asked me “How do you build carrier-grade (5 nines) cloud infrastructure with VMware NSX?”

Short answer: You don’t… and it’s a wrong question anyway.

A year ago I was a firm believer in the unlimited powers of Software-Defined Data Centers and their ability to simplify workload migrations. After all, if you can use an API to create any data center object, what’s stopping you from moving the workload running in a data center to another location.

As always, there’s a huge difference between theory and reality.

A few days ago I had a nice chat with Christoph Jaggi about private and public clouds, and the mistakes you can make when building a private cloud – the topics we’ll be discussing in the Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds workshop @ Data Center Day in Berne in mid-September.

The German version of our talk has been published on Inside-IT; those of you not fluent in German will find the English version below.

Gabi Gerber (the wonderful mastermind behind the Data Center Day event) is helping me bring my Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds workshop (one of the best Interop 2015 workshops) to Switzerland.

This is the only cloud design workshop I’m running in Europe in 2015. If you’d like to attend it, this is your only chance – register NOW.

At least a dozen engineers sent me emails or tweets mentioning Project Calico in the last few weeks – obviously the project is getting some real traction, so it was high time to look at what it’s all about.

TL&DR: Project Calico is yet another virtual networking implementation that’s a perfect fit for a particular use case, but falters when encountering the morass of edge cases.

The proponents of microsegmentation are quick to explain how the per-VM-NIC traffic filtering functionality replaces the traditional role of subnets as security zones, often concluding that “you can deploy as many tenants as you wish in a flat network, and use VM NIC firewall to isolate them.”