If you’ve been reading my blog in the last few months, you might have noticed that I started a new podcast focused on software-defined everything (hence the name: Software Gone Wild – thanks to Jason Edelman).

The latest episodes are always available on this page; you can also subscribe to the podcast feed in RSS, Atom or iTunes format… and if you wonder why we need yet-another podcast, read the About Software Gone Wild document.

If you mention open-source cloud orchestration tools these days, everyone immediately thinks about OpenStack (including the people who spent months or years trying to make it ready for production use). In the meantime, there are at least two other comparable open-source products (CloudStack and Eucalyptus) that nobody talks about. Obviously having a working product is not as sexy as having 50+ vendors and analysts producing press releases.

A while ago Cisco added dynamic FCoE support to Nexus 5000 switches. It sounded interesting and I wanted to talk about it in my Data Center Fabrics update session, but I couldn’t find any documentation at that time.

In the meantime, the Configuring Dynamic FCoE Using FabricPath configuration guide appeared on Cisco’s web site and J Metz wrote a lengthly blog post explaining how it all works, triggering a severe attack of déjà vu.

When we were discussing my autumn travel plans, my lovely wife asked me “What are you going to talk about in Bern?” She has a technical background, but I didn’t feel like going into the intricacies of SDN, SDDC and NetOps, so I told her the essence of my keynote speech:

After the initial onslaught of SDN washing, four distinct approaches to SDN have started to emerge, from centralized control plane architectures to smart reuse of existing protocols.

As always, each approach has its benefits and drawbacks, and there’s no universally best solution. You just got four more (somewhat immature) tools in your toolbox. And now for the details.

I spent last Tuesday in Bern attending the SIGS DC Day Event, and came back home extremely pleasantly surprised. The conference was nice and cozy, giving everyone plenty of opportunities to chat about data center technical challenges (thanks for all the wonderful conversations we had – you know who you are!).

Having the opportunity to meet fellow networking engineers and compare notes is great, but it’s even better to combine that with new knowledge, and that’s where the event really excelled.

Seamus Gilchrist sent me a fantastic list of MPLS- and MPLS-TE-related questions. Instead of starting an email exchange we agreed on something that should benefit a wider community: a lengthy whiteboard session discussing the basics of MPLS, MPLS-TE, load balancing and QoS in MPLS networks…

The first part of our conversation is already online: The Essence of MPLS.

A while ago Rick Parker told me about his amazing project: he started a meetup group that will build a reference private/hybrid cloud heavily relying on virtualized network services, and publish all documentation related to their effort, from high-level architecture to device and software configurations, and wiring plans.

In Episode 8 of Software Gone Wild Rick told us more about his project, and we simply couldn’t avoid a long list of topics including:

A few days ago Garrett Wollman published his exasperating experience running IPv6 on large L2 subnets with Juniper Ex4200 switches, concluding that “… much in IPv6 design and implementation has been botched by protocol designers and vendors …” (some of us would forcefully agree) making IPv6 “…simply unsafe to run on a production network…”

The resulting debate on Hacker News is quite interesting (and Andrew Yourtchenko is trying hard to keep it close to facts) and definitely worth reading… but is ND/MLD really as broken as some people claim it is?

VMware announced several vMotion enhancements in vSphere 6, ranging from “finally” to “interesting”.

vMotion across virtual switches. Finally. The tricks you had to use previous were absolutely bizarre.