Category: Virtualization

I wanted to test routing protocol behavior (IS-IS in particular) on partially meshed multi-access layer-2 networks like private VLANs or Carrier Ethernet E-Tree service. I recently spent plenty of time creating a Vagrant/libvirt lab environment on my Intel NUC running Ubuntu 20.04, and I wanted to use that environment in my tests.

Challenge-of-the-day: How do you implement private VLAN functionality with Vagrant using libvirt plugin?

There might be interesting KVM/libvirt options I’ve missed, but so far I figured two ways of connecting Vagrant-controlled virtual machines in libvirt environment:

Remember my rants about VMware and firewall vendors promoting crazy solutions that work best in PowerPoint and cause more headaches than anything else (excluding increased vendor margins and sales team bonuses, of course)?

Here’s another we-don’t-need-all-that-complexity real-life story coming from one of my long-term subscribers:

Every now and then I call someone’s baby ugly (or maybe it was their third cousin’s baby and they nonetheless feel offended). In such cases a common resort is to cite business or market needs to prove how ignorant and clueless I am. Here’s a sample LinkedIn comment talking about my ignorance about the need for smart NICs:

The rise of custom silicon by Presando [sic], Mellanox, Amazon, Intel and others confirms there is a real market need.

Now let’s get something straight: while there are good reasons to use tons of different things that might look inappropriate, irrelevant or plain stupid to an outsider, I don’t believe in real market need argument being used to justify anything without supporting technical facts (tell me why you need that stuff and prove to me that using it is the best way of solving a problem).

Several engineers formerly working for a large virtualization vendor were pretty upset with me when I claimed that the virtualization consultants promote “disaster recovery using stretched VLANs” designs instead of alternatives that would implement proper separation of failure domains.

Guess what… it’s even worse than I thought.

Here’s a sequence of comments I received after reposting one of my “disaster recovery doesn’t need stretched VLANs” blog posts on LinkedIn sometime in late 2019:

Got this question from one of ipSpace.net subscribers:

Do we really need those intelligent datacenter switches for underlay now that we have NSX in our datacenter? Now that we have taken a lot of the intelligence out of our underlying network, what must the underlying network really provide?

Reading the marketing white papers the answer would be IP connectivity… but keep in mind that building your infrastructure based on information from vendor white papers usually gives you the results your gullibility deserves.

A Docker networking rant coming from my good friend Marko Milivojević triggered a severe case of Deja-Moo, resulting in a flood of unpleasant memories caused by too-successful “disruptive” IT vendors.

Imagine you’re working for a startup creating a cool new product in the IT infrastructure space (if you have an oversized ego you would call yourself “disruptive thought leader” on your LinkedIn profile) but nobody is taking you seriously. How about some guerrilla warfare: advertising your product to people who hate the IT operations (today we’d call that Shadow IT).

An attendee in my Building Next-Generation Data Center online course was asked to deploy numerous relatively small OpenStack cloud instances and wanted select the optimum virtual networking technology. Not surprisingly, every $vendor had just the right answer, including Arista:

We’re considering moving from hypervisor-based overlays to ToR-based overlays using Arista’s CVX for approximately 2000 VLANs.

As I explained in Overlay Virtual Networking, Networking in Private and Public Clouds and Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure (plus several presentations) you have three options to implement virtual networking in private clouds:

An attendee of our Building Network Automation Solutions online course decided to automate his NSX-T environment and sent me this question:

I will be working on NSX-T quite a lot these days and I was wondering how could I automate my workflow (lab + production) to produce a certain consistency in my work.

I’ve seen that VMware relies a lot on PowerShell and I’ve haven’t invested a lot in that yet … and I would like to get more skills and become more proficient using Python right now.

Always select the most convenient tool for the job, and regardless of personal preferences PowerShell seems to be the one to use in this case.

In previous Software Gone Wild episodes we covered Snabb Switch and numerous applications running on it, from L2VPN to 4over6 gateway and integration with Juniper vMX code.

In Episode 98 we focused on another interesting application developed by Max Rottenkolber: high-speed VPN gateway using IPsec on top of Snabb Switch (details). Enjoy!

The crazy pace of webinar sessions continued last week. Howard Marks continued his deep dive into Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, this time focusing on go-to-market strategies, failure resiliency with replicas and local RAID, and the eternal debate (if you happen to be working for a certain $vendor) whether it’s better to run your HCI code in a VM and not in hypervisor kernel like your competitor does. He concluded with the description of what major players (VMware VSAN, Nutanix and HPE Simplivity) do.