Category: Virtualization

Sometime in 2012, Chuck Hollis described how some of EMC customers use long-distance workload mobility. Not surprisingly, he focused on the VPLEX Metro part of the solution and didn’t even mention the earth-flattening requirements this idea imposes on the network. I guess you already know my views on that topic, but regardless of my personal opinions, he got me curious.

David Le Goff sent me several great SDN-related questions. Here’s the first one:

What is your take on the performance issue with software-based equipment when dealing with general purpose CPU only? Do you see this challenge as a hard stop to SDN business?

Short answer (as always) is it depends. However, I think most people approach this issue the wrong way.

A lot of engineers are concerned with what seems to be frivolous creation of new encapsulation formats supporting virtual networks. While STT makes technical sense (it allows soft switches to use existing NIC TCP offload functionality), it’s harder to figure out the benefits of VXLAN and NVGRE. Scott Lowe wrote a great blog post recently where he asked a very valid question: “Couldn’t we use MPLS over GRE or IP?” We could, but we wouldn’t gain anything by doing that.

A few days ago Big Switch announced they’ll support overlay networks in their upcoming software release. After a brief “told you so” moment (because virtual networks in physical devices don’t scale all that well) I started wondering whether they simply gave up and decided to become a Nicira copycat, so I was more than keen to have a brief chat with Kyle Forster (graciously offered by Isabelle Guis).

This topic has been on my to-write list for over a year and its working title was phrased as a question, but all the horror stories you’ve shared with me over the last year or so (some of them published in my blog) have persuaded me that there’s no question – it’s a fact.

If you think I’m rephrasing the same topic ad nauseam, you’re right, but every month or so I get an external trigger that pushes me back to the same discussion, this time an interesting comment thread on Massimo Re Ferre’s blog.

I usually use the “Nicira is Skype of virtual networking” analogy when describing the differences between Nicira’s NVP and traditional VLAN-based implementations. Cade Metz liked it so much he used it in his What Is a Virtual Network? It’s Not What You Think It Is article, so I guess a blog post is long overdue.

Before going into more details, you might want to browse through my Cloud Networking Scalability presentation (or watch its recording) – the crucial slide is this one:

Just prior to Networking Field Day, the merry band of geeks sat down with Chip Copper, Brocade’s Solutioneer (a job title almost as good as Packet Herder) to discuss the intricate details of VCS Fabric. The videos are well worth watching – the technical details are interesting, but above all, Chip is a fantastic storyteller.

VMware has a fantastic-looking cloud provisioning tool – vCloud director. It allows cloud tenants to deploy their VMs and create new virtual networks with a click of a mouse (the underlying network has to provide a range of VLANs, or you could use VXLAN or vCDNI to implement the virtual segments).

Needless to say, when engineers not familiar with the networking intricacies create point-and-click application stacks without firewalls and load balancers, you get some interesting designs.

Buying a new networking appliance (be it VPN concentrator, firewall or load balancer … aka Application Delivery Controller) is a royal pain. You never know how much performance you’ll need in two or three years (and your favorite bean counter will not allow you to scrap it in less than 4-5 years). You do know you’ll never get the performance promised in vendor’s data sheets … but you don’t always know which combination of features will kill the box.

Now, imagine someone offers you a performance guarantee – you’ll always get what you paid for. That’s what LineRate Systems, a startup just exiting stealth mode is promising.

Last week Juergen Brendel published an interesting blog post describing how you can use vCider to implement high-availability clusters with multi cloud strategy, triggering the following response from one of my readers: “I hadn't heard of vCider before but seeing stuff like this always makes me doubt my sanity – is there really a situation where the only solution is multi-site L2?”