Category: Training

When VMware launched the first version of NSX for vSphere more than four years ago, the NSBU team reached out to me and asked me to create a sponsored webinar describing NSX fundamentals, its architecture, and high-level deployment guidelines.

In the meantime we discussed updating the materials, but nothing ever happened. Time to fix that, this time from a vendor-neutral perspective. We’ll start with a day-long event on April 19^th 2018 in Zurich, Switzerland.

We managed to get another awesome lineup of speakers for the Spring 2018 Building Next-Generation Data Center online course.

Russ White, one of the authors of CCDE and CCAr programs and highly respected book author will start the course with a topic everyone should always consider when designing new infrastructure: how do you identify tradeoffs and manage complexity, making sure you meet the customer requirements while at the same time having an easy-to-operate infrastructure.

In March 2018, we’ll continue the crazy content producing pace you’ve seen in January and February:

• We’ll have the first part of NSX, ACI or EVPN webinar on March 1st. This session will cover the basics (don’t expect too many details), a follow-up session on April 24th with Mitja Robas will go into design considerations;
• The EVPN Technical Deep Dive series with Dinesh Dutt starts on March 6th;
• Elisa and Paolo will run the final part of Network Visibility with Flow Data on March 8th;
• Last webinar in March: another installment in the leaf-and-spine saga – Multi-Pod and Multi-Site Fabrics with Lukas Krattiger on March 29th;

March is also the Troopers month. I’ll run a Hands-On Network Automation workshop there and have a motivational presentation during the main conference.

Although it’s almost three months till the start of the Building Next-Generation Data Center online course, we already have most of the guest speakers. Today I’d like to introduce the first two (although they need no introduction).

You might have heard about Russ White. He was known as Mr. CCDE when that program started and recently focused more on data centers, open networking and whitebox switching. He’s also an authority on good network design and architecture, network complexity, and tradeoffs you have to make when designing a network.

Got an interesting set of questions from one of my readers. He started with:

I really like networks but I don't know if I am doing enough for this community. Most of my work is involved with technologies which are already discovered by people and I am not really satisfied with it.

Well, first you want to decide whether you want to be (primarily) a researcher (focusing on discovering new stuff), an engineer (mostly figuring out how to build useful things by using existing stuff), or an administrator (configuring stuff).

J Metz published a great article describing six hard truths not taught in school. As all good things should come in 7-tuples, here’s another one I was told ages ago when I was a young hotshot full of myself:

Professions were created for a reason – they enable people to do the work they’re qualified to do.

Needless to say, it took me decades to fully understand its implications.

Last week I described what we did in 2017. Now let’s see what the ipSpace.net subscribers will get in 2018.

New webinars

I thought that 2017 would be a year of the cloud, but that was not to be – I was too busy creating network automation and data center content.

2017 was one of the busiest years since I started the ipSpace.net project.

It started with an Ansible for Networking Engineers session covering advanced Ansible topics and network device configurations. Further sessions of that same webinar throughout 2017 added roles, includes, extending Ansible with dynamic inventory, custom modules and filters, and using NAPALM with Ansible.

For the first two sessions of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course I got awesome guest speakers, and it seems we’ll have another fantastic lineup in the Spring 2018 course:

Most network automation solutions focus on device configuration based on user request – service creation or change of data model describing the network. Another very important but often ignored aspect is automatic response to external events, and that’s what David Gee will describe in his presentation.

Here’s a quote from one of my friends who spent years working with Ansible playbooks:

Debugging Ansible is one of the most terrible experiences one can endure…

It’s not THAT bad, particularly if you have a good debugging toolbox. I described mine in the Debugging Ansible Playbooks part of the Ansible for Networking Engineers online course.

Please note that the Building Network Automation Solutions online course includes all material from the Ansible online course.