Wholesale Virtualisation and Selective QinQ

Recently I have been working on a solution to provide Wholesale Access to hosted VMs. Several of my customers have “Cloud Environments” - call it IaaS, virtualisation, a fad or whatever, this is something that I have been asked to come up with a solution for more than once.

To explain the requirements outlined in this article, I should give a little background on the design requirements and constraints. For some of my customers the standard build is to include 2x VLANs for each Customer - a Live VLAN, and an Internal/Backend network. If the customer has more than one VM in a cluster then all servers will share these VLANs. Unfortunately this quickly runs through the available VLANs (And we love that the Nexus 5k only supports 512 vlans). This limited the number of customers in a single VM cluster, due to VLAN limitations inherent in Data Centre switches.

Banished from Priv15

I was recently called into a new customer’s network to help recover some passwords on some Cisco switches and to map out the network structure. Unfortunately nobody had any idea of the last time the switches had had their configs saved or even when the last time the switches had been power cycled. From what I can gather the previous IT guy didnt leave any information for those who followed.

My favourite tool in my toolbag!

It’s seems to be the craze this week to write all about our tool bags. Stretch wrote an article on it, followed by Jeff Fry’s blog post and Tony Mattke over at Router Jockey. Not to be out done (and ever the trend setter) Jennifer Huber wrote her post 18 months ago!

So I guess to be just like the cool kids, I should write a post about my tool bag. Well I was going to, then I realised that despite how nerdy we all really are, there a limit to how many pictures of screwdrivers, cable testers and multimeters that we can actually all look at. Yes I carry the usual sorts of cables, screwdrivers, multimeters and crimping kit. I used to take my Leatherman everywhere until a run in with Airport Security on the way to Cisco Live in Melbourne (a moments silence please!).

Finally - I am a swimming pool!

Ok all, Im going to let out a secret. Long ago when I was a small child (long before I dreamed of being a janitor), when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would answer:

"I want to be a swimming pool".

Cute, no? I guess not, but that never stopped my folks from telling it to everyone of my friends. In fact my Dad put that in his speech he made at my wedding. Usually I would go all red in the face, but denying it was pointless.

You can't buy Innovation

Last weekend I was interviewing a potential new staff member for a job we have going, and we started discussing various vendors strengths and weaknesses. I put forward that I would question buying hardware from a vendor who just copies everyone else and doesn’t innovate on their own undertaking.

The response from one of the people present was that you can buy innovation (eg Cisco buying back Nuova, HP buying 3Com and thus H3C). I didn’t respond at first to this statement because I wasn’t really sure how I felt. After some thought I have decided how I feel.

Introduction to Data Centre 3.0

So I woke up this morning to a couple of people on twitter talking about my Data Centre 3.0 presentation from NZNOG in January. I was really confused why people would all of a sudden start talking about this 2.5 months after it was presented. As I was leaving work tonight I checked my RSS feeds to see that Greg Ferro had posted a new article to his blog with a link to the video recording of that presentation.

First Step Down - Written Complete

I havent blogged at all for March (and this is only a very brief one) because I have been very busy studying and it seems to have paid off! I managed to get the first step towards my CCIE R&S exam out of the way last week - I passed my CCIE Written exam :)

I made the commitment back in December to sit the exam while I was at Cisco Live Melbourne 2011. If you have been following any of my tweets so far this year you may have noticed that I have spent nearly as many days out of the country as I have in. My work travel schedule was pretty hectic for January and February and I didnt have as much time dedicated to study as had hoped.

Multi-Vendor Networking - The Two Edged Sword

A couple of weeks back, when we recorded Episode 33 of Packet Pushers Podcast, one of the items we had on the list of topics to discuss was that of multi-vendor networks and the recent Gartner report on the topic.

Due to various reasons this topic was taken off the list, but I still had a few thoughts on the topic so I decided to write this blog post to discuss some of them.

Proprietary Cometh before the Standard

Driving home the other night I was listening to the latest episode of the podcast “Coffee with Thomas”. This episode had our host, Thomas Jones, interviewing Steve Chambers of ViewYonder (and also a history of great vendors!). During the interview, Steve made the following comment:

It amazes me that people criticise Cisco for not be standardised on things that are brand new, as if the standards bodies are innovators. That is not their job. They follow up after things have been invented.

This statement took me back at first, and I was about to write it off as protecting your own team, but the further I drove (I have a very long commute - about 100km each way) the more I thought about this statement and the evidence - both historical and current.

Cambodia: Networking in a world of contrasts

As some of my readers may know, I have spent the last week and a bit in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), setting up the new office for my company (eintellego). I had never been to Asia before this trip - outside of a couple of lay-overs in Japan in 2002 and 2003, or the 45 mins sitting on the plane in Bangkok Airport on the way to Abu Dhabi last November. I had no idea what to expect when stepping out of the airport.