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Last week I had the opportunity to join John Troyer on the VMware Communities podcast. My purpose, as John put it when he invited me, was to “gently introduce” the community to the idea of network virtualization, which is where I now spend most of my time since joining VMware in early February. emphasis mine).
This is different from the current software first movement in that Cisco’s approach is based on their hardware first view of the network. However, if you were to go by the response to the number of vendors supporting the NSX ecosystem you’d think the entire industry is going against this hardware first religion. Arista – Top of Rack.
Networking Lee Briggs (formerly of Pulumi, now with Tailscale) shows how to use the Tailscale Operator to create “free” Kubernetes loadbalancers (“free” as in no additional charge above and beyond what it would normally cost to operate a Kubernetes cluster). Thanks for reading! Read more about it in this post.
First up is Brent Salisbury’s how to build an SDN lab without needing OpenFlow hardware. Bruce Davie and Martin Casado (with Nicira, now part of VMware) have written a post comparing the VXLAN and STT tunneling protocols. Servers/Hardware. I needed to fill in some other knowledge gaps first.) Why is this important?
Speaker: Martin Casado (VMware Networking CTO). The network industry has focused on protocols for a long time because of the need interoperate hardware devices between vendors. The Second are is the higher level layers such as loadbalancing. VMware addressed this in an earlier post.
The latter can be open-source software such as OpenStack, CloudStack or commercial products such as Citrix CloudPlatform or VMware Cloud Director (VCD). The user level elements that are managed within such an IaaS cloud are virtual servers, cloud storage and shared resources such as loadbalancers and firewalls.
Kit Colbert (VMware Principal Architect) & Carl Ecshenbach (VMware COO) Joe Baguley (VMware CTO, EMEA). VMware is talking about the business of IT and how they enable their own business to deliver applications. VMware is of course pushing their virtual SAN solution (vSAN) to provision and control storage.
VM-to-VM (on the same host) via a hardware-based virtual switch in an SR-IOV network interface card (NIC). VMDq can provide a hardware assist when the hypervisor softswitch is involved, or you can use hypervisor bypass and SR-IOV to attach VMs directly to VFs (virtual functions). Note that there are trade-offs as a result.)
The only major things missing from their "Starter Kit" suite they offer are the addition of VMware - not cheap if you choose to purchase it - as well as the addition of a blade (or two) to serve as controllers of the system. The UCS Manager software bundled with the system provides core functionality (see diagram, right).
The next step is to define in software the converged network, its switching, and even network devices such as loadbalancers. Provisioning of the network, VLANs, IP loadbalancing, etc. By integrating with VMware's Virtual Center, Xsigo provided a building block. This permits physically flatter networks.
Some folks from Nicira (now part of VMware) recently published a blog post discussing the OVSDB IETF draft (see here ). Servers/Hardware. If storage is your thing—especially in VMware environments—I’d recommend having a look at Cormac Hogan’s blog for his series on vSphere 5.1 Networking. It starts here.
Romain Decker has an “under the hood” look at the VMware NSX loadbalancer. Servers/Hardware. This graphical summary of the AWS Application LoadBalancer (ALB) is pretty handy. Vladan Seget shares how to create a VMware ESXi ISO image with the latest patches. Nothing this time (sorry!).
Existing physical IO but with address hardware-based mapping/virtualization (e.g. In much the same way that the hypervisor has since been embedded in tools like VMware’s vCenter, IOV can (and has been) embedded with higher-level management tools. Converged Networking Adapters (e.g. Qlogic , Emulex ). HP VirtualConnect ).
Humair Ahmed of VMware shares some details on a new control plane resiliency feature recently added to VMware NSX: Controller Disconnected Operation (CDO) mode. Servers/Hardware. Brandon Gordon shares how to use VMware Harbor and VMware Admiral in a vCloud Air Network (vCAN) environment for container management.
The rise of the disaggregated network operating system (NOS) marches on: this time, it’s Big Switch Networks announcing expanded hardware support in Open Network Linux (ONL) , upon which its own NOS is based. Servers/Hardware. Cormac Hogan has a brief update on storage options for containers on VMware. Check this out.
Eric Sloof mentions the NSX-T loadbalancing encyclopedia (found here ), which intends to be an authoritative resource to NSX-T loadbalancing configuration and management. Servers/Hardware. Now I really want to see hardware security key support in the desktop and mobile apps! Time to get patching, folks!
The collection of links shared below covers a fairly wide range of topics, from old Sun hardware to working with serverless frameworks in the public cloud. The first is a post on Cilium and F5 loadbalancer integration , while the second discusses implementing Kubernetes network policies with Cilium and Linkerd. Networking.
VMware recently released a reference design guide for NSX-T; see here for more details. Viktor van den Berg writes on deploying NSX loadbalancers with vRA. Servers/Hardware. Dimitri de Swart has a write-up on LAMP stacks made easy with VMware and Puppet. I hope it proves useful! Networking. Larry Smith Jr.
Looking for a step-by-step install guide for VMware NSX? Ray Budavari—who is an absolutely fantastic NSX resource—has a blog post up on the integration between VMware NSX and vRealize Automation. If you’d like to play around with Cumulus Linux but don’t have a compatible hardware switch, Cumulus VX is the answer. Networking.
Servers/Hardware. Rudi Martinsen has an article on changing the Avi loadbalancer license tier (this is in the context of using it with vSphere with Tanzu). Eric Sloof has information on how to disable VMware plugins in vCenter Server (the context of the article is security vulnerabilities disclosed in plugins).
Kamal Kyrala discusses a method for accessing Kubernetes Services without Ingress, NodePort, or loadbalancers. Servers/Hardware. What I found interesting is that the local NVMe storage is also hardware encrypted. VMware rock star Frank Denneman provides an introduction to Elastic DRS , a feature of VMware Cloud on AWS.
Xavier Avrillier walks readers through using Antrea (a Kubernetes CNI built on top of Open vSwitch—a topic I’ve touched on a time or two) to provide on-premise loadbalancing in Kubernetes. Servers/Hardware. Cabling is hardware, right? Levent Ogut takes a deep dive into Kubernetes init containers.
Servers/Hardware. Sean Collins has an article on building a cheap, compact, and multinode DevStack environment for a home lab that lays out some server hardware decisions and the tools he uses to manage them. William Lam shares an article on using Ansible to provision Kubernetes on VMware Photon. Docker and Solaris Zones?
Tom’s key point is that disaggregating software from hardware—which is kind of a given if you’re buying whitebox networking gear—gives you the (potential) flexibility to repurpose network gear based on the software running on it. Servers/Hardware. However, it’s at least possible with whitebox networking gear. Virtualization.
The “TL;DR” for those who are interested is that this solution bypasses the normal iptables layer involved in most Kubernetes implementations to loadbalance traffic directly to Pods in the cluster. Servers/Hardware. Unfortunately, this appears to be GKE-specific. Nothing this time around.
Servers/Hardware. Massimo Re Ferre has a great article discussing VMware Cloud on AWS versus Azure Stack and breaking down the differences between the two approaches. John Kozej walks through how to configure vCenter HA using the NSX loadbalancer. Ivan Pepelnjak speaks frankly about VMware Cloud on AWS.
Continuing on that Envoy theme, you may find this article by Matt Klein—one of the primary authors of Envoy—helpful in understanding some of the concepts behind modern loadbalancing and proxying. Servers/Hardware. Fellow VMware alum Steve Flanders has a write-up on running Kubernetes locally (on a Mac).
Servers/Hardware. Rudi Martinsen has an article on changing the Avi loadbalancer license tier (this is in the context of using it with vSphere with Tanzu). Eric Sloof has information on how to disable VMware plugins in vCenter Server (the context of the article is security vulnerabilities disclosed in plugins).
David Holder walks through removing unused loadbalancer IP allocations in NSX-T when used with PKS. Servers/Hardware. Software company Agile Bits recently announced support for U2F-compatible hardware security keys in their 1Password product. I’m looking forward to seeing how NaaS evolves. Virtualization.
This low level software allowed multiple applications to run on the same physical hardware but believe that they had the box all to themselves. This resulted in the IT department having to maintain farms of servers that were all horribly underutilized. The arrival of virtualization software changed everything. No related posts.
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