Building large-scale VLANs to support IaaS services is every data center designer’s nightmare and the low number of VLANs supported by some data center gear is not helping anyone. However, as Anonymous Coward pointed out in a comment to my Building a Greenfield Data Center post, service providers have been building very large (and somewhat stable) layer-2 transport networks for years. It does seem like someone is trying to reinvent the wheel (and/or sell us more gear).

I’ve already written about the stupidities of risking the stability of two data centers to enable live migration of “mission critical” VMs between them. Now let’s take the discussion a step further – after hearing how critical the VM the server or application team wants to migrate is, you might be tempted to ask “and how do you ensure its high availability the rest of the time?” The response will likely be along the lines of “We’re using VMware High Availability” or even prouder “We’re using VMware Fault Tolerance to ensure even a hardware failure can’t bring it down.”

Accumulated in my Inbox during the second half of July:

Virtualization

Duncan Epping wrote a long series of posts describing the new VMware’s High Availability implementation: Fault domain manager, Primary nodes, Datastore heartbeating, Restarting VMs and finally Advanced settings.

Chris sent me an interesting question:

Imagine L2 traffic between two VMs on different ESX hosts, both using Nexus 1000V. Will the physical switches see the traffic with source and destination MACs matching the VM’s vNICs or traffic on NX1000V “packet” VLAN between VEMs (in this case, the packet VLAN would act as a virtual backplane)?

It seems that most networking vendors consider the Flat Earth architectures the new bonanza. Everyone is running to join the gold rush, from Cisco’s FabricPath and Brocade’s VCS to HP’s IRF and Juniper’s upcoming QFabric. As always, the standardization bodies are following the industry with a large buffet of standards to choose from: TRILL, 802.1ag (SPB), 802.1Qbg (EVB) and 802.1bh (Port extenders).

The following design challenge landed in my Inbox not too long ago:

My organization is the in the process of building a completely new data center from the ground up (new hardware, software, protocols ...). We will currently start with one site but may move to two for DR purposes. What DC technologies should we be looking at implementing to build a stable infrastructure that will scale and support technologies you feel will play a big role in the future?

In an ideal world, my answer would begin with “Start with the applications.”

I got an interesting question after writing the Asymmetric MPLS MTU Problem post:

Why does PHP happen only on directly-connected interfaces but not on other non-MPLS routes?

Obviously it’s time for a deep dive into Penultimate Hop Popping (PHP) mysteries (warning label: read the MPLS books if you plan to get seriously involved with MPLS).

Russell Heilling made a highly interesting observation in a comment to my MPLS MTU challenges post: you could get asymmetric MTUs in MPLS networks due to penultimate hop popping.

Imagine our network has the following topology (drawn with the fantastic tools used by the RFC authors):

S---CE---R1===R2---FW---C

I was sort of upset that my vacations were making me miss the VMware vSphere 5.0 launch event (on the other hand, being limited to half hour Internet access served with early morning cappuccino is not necessarily a bad thing), but after I managed to get home, I realized I hadn’t really missed much. Let me rephrase that – VMware launched a major release of vSphere and the networking features are barely worth mentioning (or maybe they’ll launch them when the vTax brouhaha subsides).

After the bumpy start of our holidays, we thoroughly enjoyed the crystal-clear waters, hot sunny weather and the hospitality of inhabitants of Croatian island Brač ... until my daughter came to me quietly asking “hey, I don’t want to raise panic, but my friend saw a weird cloud ... would you mind checking if it’s a forest fire” A short walk to a vantage point confirmed the initial observation – we were facing what turned out to be the worst forest fire in more than a decade. Obviously I was bound to receive another hefty dose of disaster recovery lessons.