Category: Virtualization

The original idea behind cloud-as-an-appliance design came from Brad Hedlund’s blog post in which he described how he’d build a greenfield Hadoop or private cloud cluster with servers connected to a Clos fabric. Throw virtual appliances into the mix and you get an extremely simple and versatile architecture:

In his recent blog post Joe Onisick wrote “What network virtualization doesn’t provide, in any form, is a change to the model we use to deploy networks and support applications. [...] All of the same broken or misused methodologies are carried forward. [...] Faithful replication of today’s networking challenges as virtual machines with encapsulation tunnels doesn’t move the bar for deploying applications.”

The long-promised unicast-only VXLAN has finally shipped with the Nexus 1000V release 4.2(1)SV2(2.1) (there must be some logic behind those numbers, but they all look like madness to me). The new Nexus 1000V release brings two significant VXLAN enhancements: unicast-only mode and MAC distribution mode.

I was reading What Network Virtualization Isn’t¹ from Jon Onisick the other day and started experiencing all sorts of unpleasant flashbacks caused by my overly long exposure to networking industry missteps and dead ends touted as the best possible solutions or architectures in the days of their glory:

Meeting Brad Hedlund in person was definitely one of the highlights of my Interop 2013 week. We had an awesome conversation and quickly realized how closely aligned our views of VLANs, overlay networks and virtual appliances are.

Not surprisingly, Brad quickly improved my ideas with a radical proposal: running BGP between the virtual and the physical world.

One of my blogger friends sent me an interesting observation:

After talking to networking vendors I'm inclined to think they are going to focus on a mesh of overlays from the TOR, with possible use of overlays between vswitch and TOR too if desired - drawing analogies to MPLS with ToR a PE and vSwitch a CE. Aside from selling more hardware for this, I'm not drawn towards a solution like this bc it doesn't help with full network virtualization and a network abstraction for VMs.

The whole situation reminds me of the good old SNA and APPN days with networking vendors playing the IBM part of the comedy.

Brad Hedlund wrote another great article, this one explaining the fundamentals of network virtualization. As you'll see, VMware (and everyone else) aims way higher than replacing VLANs with overlay networks. Highly recommended!

Regardless of what the vendors are telling you, it’s hard to get data center disaster recovery right (unless you’re running regular fire drills), and your job usually gets harder due to the intricate (sometimes undocumented) intertwining of physical and virtual worlds. For example, do you know how to get the firewall and load balancer configurations from the failed site implemented in the equipment currently used at disaster recovery site?

Imagine a simple application stack with a few web servers, app servers and two database servers. There’s a firewall in front of the web servers and a load balancer tying all the segments together.

It took years before the rumored Cisco vSwitch materialized (in the form of Nexus 1000v), several more years before there was the first competitor (IBM Distributed Virtual Switch), and who knows how long before the third entrant (recently announced HP vSwitch) jumps out of PowerPoint slides and whitepapers into the real world.

Compare that to the Hyper-V environment, where we have at least two virtual switches (Nexus 1000V and NEC's PF1000) mere months after Hyper-V's general availability.

A while ago, while listening to an interesting CloudCast podcast (my second favorite podcast - the best one out there is still the Packet Pushers), I stumbled upon an interesting idea “Data has gravity”. The podcast guest used that idea to explain how data agglomerates in larger and larger chunks and how it makes sense to move the data processing (application) closer to the data.