While network overlays are not a new concept, they have come back into the limelight, thanks to drivers brought on by large-scale virtualization. Several standards have been proposed to enable virtual networks to be layered over a physical network infrastructure: VXLAN, NVGRE, and SST. While each proposed standard uses different…
Year: 2012
Why We Need Network Abstraction
The move to highly virtualized data centers and cloud models is straining the network. While traditional data center networks were not designed to support the dynamic nature of today’s workloads, the fact is, the emergence of highly virtualized environments is merely exposing issues that have always existed within network constructs….
Data Center Overlays 101
I’ve been playing around with Show Me (www.showme.com) as a tool to add some white boarding to the blog. Here’s my first crack at it covering Data Center Network overlays. Related posts: Data Center 101: Server Virtualization Data Center 101: Server Systems Data Center 101: Local Area Network Switching Network…
NVGRE
The most viable competitor to VXLAN is NVGRE which was proposed by Microsoft, Intel, HP and Dell. It is another encapsulation technique intended to allow virtual network overlays across the physical network. Both techniques also remove the scalability issues with VLANs which are bound at a max of 4096. NVGRE…
Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT)
STT is another tunneling protocol along the lines of the VXLAN and NVGRE proposals. As with both of those the intent of STT is to provide a network overlay, or virtual network running on top of a physical network. STT was proposed by Nicira and is therefore not surprisingly written…
VXLAN Deep Dive – Part II
In part one of this post I covered the basic theory of operations and functionality of VXLAN (http://www.definethecloud.net/vxlan-deep-dive.) This post will dive deeper into how VXLAN operates on the network. Let’s start with the basic concept that VXLAN is an encapsulation technique. Basically the Ethernet frame sent by a VXLAN…
VXLAN Deep Dive
I’ve been spending my free time digging into network virtualization and network overlays. This is part 1 of a 2 part series, part 2 can be found here: http://www.definethecloud.net/vxlan-deep-divepart-2. By far the most popular virtualization technique in the data center is VXLAN. This has as much to do with Cisco…
Something up Brocade’s Sleeve, and it looks Good
Brocade’s got some new tricks up their sleeve and they look good. For far too long Brocade fought against convergence to protect its FC install base and catch up. This bled over into their Ethernet messaging and hindered market growth and comfort levels there. Overall they appeared as a company…
The Art of Pre-Sales Part II: Showing Value
Part I of this post http://www.definethecloud.net/the-art-of-pre-sales received quite a few page views and positive feedback so I thought I’d expand on it. Last week on the Twitters I made a comment re sales engineers showing value via revenue ($$) and got a lot of feedback. I thought I’d expand on…
A Salute to Greatness
There are two things I’ve spent my life doing: being a class clown (laughed at or with is your choice) and building my career. Since I was 16 I’ve worked no less than 40 hour weeks and more consistently been immersed in IT upwards of 80. I have rarely taken…