During Interop 2014 I got involved in numerous interesting conversations revolving around SDN and new operations models (including the heretic idea of bundling appliances with application stacks and making developers responsible for network services).

During one of those discussions someone said “I think I get the ideas behind DevOps, but I don’t think we should configure our network devices with Puppet or Chef” to which I replied “Puppet or Chef are just tools, DevOps is a lifestyle.”

Paul Unbehagen made an interesting claim when presenting Avaya network built for Sochi Olympics during a recent Tech Field Day event: “we didn’t need MPLS or BGP to implement L2- and L3VPN. It was all done with SPB and IS-IS.”

Most ISPs rolling out large-scale residential IPv6 agree it’s a no-brainer, but the rest of the world still hesitates.

To help the dubious majority cross the (perceived) shaky bridge across the gaping chasm between IPv4 and IPv6, a team of great engineers with decades of IPv6 operational experience (including networking gurus from Time Warner, Comcast and Yahoo, and the never-tiring IPv6 evangelist Jan Žorž) wrote an IPv6 Troubleshooting for Helpdesks document.

When I first heard about NFV, I thought it was just another steaming pile of hype designed to push the appliance vendors to offer their solutions in VM format. After all, we’re past the hard technical challenges: most appliances deserve to have an Intel Inside sticker, performance problems have been addressed (see Intel DPDK, 6WIND, PF_ring and Snabb Switch), so what’s stopping us from deploying NFV apart from stubborn vendors who want to sell hardware, not licenses?

I always recommended EBGP-based designs for DMVPN networks due to the significant complexity of running IBGP without an underlying IGP. The neighbor next-hop-self all feature introduced in recent Cisco IOS releases has totally changed my perspective – it makes IBGP-over-DMVPN the best design option unless you want to use DMVPN network as a backup for MPLS/VPN network.

In the first half hour of the Infrastructure for Private Clouds workshop at last week’s Interop Las Vegas I focused on business aspects of private cloud design: defining the customers, the services, and the level of self-service you’ll offer to your customers.

Nick Martin published a great summary of these topics @ SearchServerVirtualization; I couldn’t have done it better myself (they want to get your email address, but this article is definitely worth it).

I had a nice chat with Doug Gourlay from Arista during the Interop Las Vegas and he made an interesting remark along the lines of “in leaf-and-spine fabrics it doesn’t make sense to use redundant supervisors in switches – they cause more problems than they solve.”

As always, in the end it all depends on your environment and use case, but he definitely has a point; good engineering always works better than a heap of kludges.

During one of the ExpertExpress engagements I helped a company implement the BGP Everywhere concept, significantly simplifying their routing by replacing unstable route redistribution between BGP and IGP with a single BGP domain running across MPLS/VPN and DMVPN networks.

They had a pretty simple core site network, so we decided to establish an IBGP session between DMVPH hub router and MPLS/VPN CE router (managed by the SP).

Not sure I published a link to this video: the overview of VMware NSX Architecture (for additional details watch other videos from the VMware NSX Architecture webinar).

Friday roundtables are one of the best parts of the Troopers conference – this year we were busy discussing (among other things) how safe the hypervisors are as compared to more traditional network isolation paradigms.

TL&DR summary: If someone manages to break into your virtualized infrastructure, he’ll probably find easier ways to hop around than hypervisor exploits.

I don’t think it would be too hard to guess the topic of my talk at the recent Troopers conference: SDN was the obvious choice, and the presentation simply had to include security aspects of SDN.

TL&DR summary: We know how to do it. We also know it's not simple.

An interesting startup is launching their SDN solution @ Interop Las Vegas today: Quantum Networks use the latest quantum computing technology to solve some of the hardest problems of controller-based networking.

One of the fundamental problems of hardware-based OpenFlow solutions is the flow update rate – most switches using merchant silicon can insert around 1000 new flows per second into their forwarding tables. Technologies based on quantum mechanics effects change all that – a quantum entanglement technology patented by Quantum Networks can install new flows instantaneously across the whole network.

A few years ago I lambasted the lack of STP support in Brocade’s VCS fabric. It took Brocade over two years to solve the problem, but they finally came up with an interesting end-to-end solution.

Here are a few highlights; for more details read the Configuring STP-type Protocols section in Network OS Administrator Guide.

Last June Tore Anderson talked about his IPv6-only data center deployment (the idea made very popular recently after Facebook’s presentation @ V6 World Congress) in one of my free webinars. In case you missed the videos explaining the technical details, watch them or view Tore’s slide deck.

A comment by Pieter E. Smit on my vSphere Does Not Need LAG Bandaids post opened yet another can of worms: vSphere behavior on uplink recovery.

Short summary: vSphere starts using an uplink as soon as its physical layer becomes operational, which might happen during ToR switch startup phase, or before a ToR switch port enters forwarding state.