... in a VXLAN segment (over UDP-over-IP-over-EoMPLS-over-MPLS-over-GRE-over-IPsec-over-IP-over-MPLS/VPN-over-MPLS-over-PPPoE-over-ATM-over-ATOM-over ...)

Source: DevOps reactions

Here’s the first video from the ProgrammableFlow webinar. Don’t get too excited, it’s yet another introduction to OpenFlow and control/data plane separation (but it is an animated one ;). More goodies to follow ...

I had an interesting conversation with Doug Hanks (@douglashanksjr) about the need for intra-spine links in leaf-and-spine fabric designs. You clearly don’t need links between spine switches when every leaf node (switch or router/firewall/load balancer) is connected to all spine switches ... but what happens when one of the leaf-to-spine links fails? Will other leaf switches know that they have to avoid the spine switch with the failed link?

Cisco launched two new data center switches on Monday: Nexus 6001, a 1RU ToR switch with the exact same port configuration as any other ToR switch on the market (48 x 10GE, 4 x 40GE usable as 16 x 10GE) and Nexus 6004, a monster spine switch with 96 40GE ports (it has the same bandwidth as Arista’s 7508 in a 4RU form factor and three times as many 40GE ports as Dell Force10 Z9000).

Apart from slightly higher port density, Nexus 6001 looks almost like Nexus 5548 (which has 48 10GE ports) or Nexus 3064X. So where’s the beef?

Brad Hedlund made a pretty valid comment to my “NEC Launched a Virtual OpenFlow Switch” blog post: “On the other hand, it's NEC end-to-end or no dice”, implicating the ultimate vendor lock-in.

Of course he’s right and while, as Bob Plankers explains, you can never escape some lock-in (part 1, response from Greg Ferro, part 2 – all definitely worth reading), you do have to ask yourself “am I looking for Windows or Mac?”

Martin Bernier has decided to open another can of IPv6 worms: how do you address multiple subnets in a very typical setup where you use a firewall (example: ASA) to connect a SMB network to the outside world?

During the IPv6 Security webinar, Eric Vyncke explained the intricate details of IPv6 Security Neighbor Discovery (SEND) and the reasons it will probably never take off.

We published the first draft of the BGP Operations and Security document almost a year ago. In the meantime, the authors and Merike Kaeo presented the draft at RIPE and IETF meetings and collected literally tons of feedback (well documented in change logs) ... and finally the draft was adopted as IETF opsec workgroup document and republished under a new name.

During a recent vMotion-over-VXLAN discussion Chris Saunders made a very good point: “Folks should be asking a better question, like: Can I use VXLAN and vMotion together to meet my business requirements.”

Yeah, it’s always worth exploring the actual business needs.

Based on a true story ...

A while ago I was sitting in a roomful of extremely intelligent engineers working for a large data center company. Unfortunately they had been listening to a wrong group of virtualization consultants and ended up with the picture-perfect disaster-in-waiting: two data centers bridged together to support a stretched VMware HA cluster.

Most web application developers remain blissfully unaware of the major performance roadblocks their applications face in the wild: access network bandwidth restrictions and unexpectedly high latency (see also Fallacies of Distributed Computing with an in-depth explanation). The impact of these two roadblocks is further amplified by behavior of TCP and HTTP, the protocols used by almost all web applications.