Category: virtualization

In 2014, we did a series of podcasts on Snabb Switch (Snabb Switch and OpenStack, Deep Dive), a software-only switch delivering 10-20 Gbps of forwarded bandwidth per x86 core. In the meantime, Snabb community slowly expanded, optimized the switching code, built a number of solutions on top of the packet forwarding core, and even forked a just-in-time Lua compiler to get better performance.

To find out the details, listen to Episode 91 of Software Gone Wild in which Luke Gorrie explained how far the Snabb project has progressed in the last four years.

Here's a trick question: how often do your Visio diagrams match what's really implemented in your network?

Wouldn't it be great to be able to create or modify them on-the-fly based on what's really configured in the network? That's exactly what Anthony Burke demonstrated in the PowerNSX part of PowerShell for Networking Engineers webinar (source code).

You’ll need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video.

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.

After introducing PowerNSX Anthony Burke illustrated how easy it is to use with a Hello, World equivalent: creating a logical switch (VXLAN segment).

You’ll need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video.

Want to know more about VMware NSX? We’ll run an NSX-focused event and a NSX Deep Dive workshop in Zurich on April 19th 2018, an overview webinar comparing NSX, ACI and EVPN on March 1st, and a deep dive in VMware NSX architecture later in 2018.

One of the beauties of VMware NSX is that it’s fully API-based – you can automate any aspect of it by writing a script (or using any of the network automation tools) that executes a series of well-defined (and well-documented) API calls.

To make that task even easier, VMware released PowerNSX, an open-source library of PowerShell commandlets that abstract the internal details of NSX API and give you an easy-to-use interface (assuming you use PowerShell as your automation tool).

One of my readers wanted to know more about containers and wondered how ipSpace.net materials could help him. Here’s a short step-by-step guide:

I published this blog post to help ipSpace.net subscribers navigate through Docker- and containers-related material. You might want to skip it if you’re not one of them.

In every SDDC workshop I tried to persuade the audience that the virtual appliances (particularly per-application instances of virtual appliances) are the way to go. I usually got the questions along the lines of “who will manage and audit all these instances?” but once someone asked “and how will we upgrade them?”

Short answer: you won’t.

VMware started talking about VMware Cloud on AWS a while ago, and my first response was “yeah, it’s just vCloud Air but they wanted to get rid of CapEx, so it’s running on someone else’s servers”

Last week Frank Denneman published a technical overview of the solution and I was mostly correct.

We’re almost done with our data center infrastructure optimization journey. In this step, we’ll virtualize the network services.

One of my readers sent me a lengthy email describing his NSX-versus-ACI views. He started with [slightly reworded]:

What I want to do is to create customer templates to speed up deployment of application environments, as it takes too long at the moment to set up a new application environment.

That’s what we all want. How you get there is the interesting part.

I’m running a hyperconverged infrastructure event with Mitja Robas on April 6th, and so my friend Christoph Jaggi sent me a list of interesting questions, starting with:

What are hyperconverged infrastructures?

The German version of the interview is published on inside-it.ch.

When Cisco ACI was launched it promised to do everything you need (plus much more, and in multi-hypervisor environment). It was quickly obvious that you can’t do all that on ToR switches, and need control of the virtual switch (the real network edge) to get the job done.

In the last part of the free Docker Networking Fundamentals webinar Dinesh Dutt described the newer high-performance networking options (Macvlan and Ipvlan) introduced in Docker version 1.12.

In Episode 69 of Software Gone Wild we discussed ways of increasing visibility into VXLAN transport fabric. Another thing we badly need is visibility into the virtual edge behavior, and to help you get there Iwan Rahabok created a set of vRealize dashboards that include the virtual edge networking components. Hope you’ll find them useful.

Running Linux containers on a single host is relatively easy. Building private multi-tenant networks across multiple hosts immediately creates the usual networking mess.

Fortunately the Socketplane team did a pretty good job; for more details watch the video from Docker Networking Fundamentals webinar or listen to the podcast I did with them a year ago.