Scott Lowe

AUGUST 27, 2021

I have a fairly diverse set of links for readers this time around, covering topics from microchips to improving your writing, with stops along the way in topics like Kubernetes, virtualization, Linux, and the popular JSON-parsing tool jq along the way. Michael Kashin shares the journey of containerizing NVIDIA Cumulus Linux.

Linux 60

Linux Load Balancer Malware Virtualization 60

Scott Lowe

DECEMBER 17, 2015

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.

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Architecture Hardware 60

Scott Lowe

SEPTEMBER 11, 2012

Devices first started as tightly-coupled hardware and software solutions. In recent years, we’ve seen more devices running off-the-shelf software (like Linux). Is the Linux bridge efficient enough? Verplanke next reviews some of the I/O optimizations and architecture of the Xeon E5 2600 series platform.

Virtualization 113

Virtualization Intel Cloud Data 113

Scott Lowe

MARCH 10, 2015

I highly recommend you read the entire post, but in short the five skills Matt recommends are software skills (which includes configuration management and software development tools like Git ), Linux, deep protocol knowledge, hypervisor and container networking, and IPv6. Servers/Hardware. What does this mean?

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Hardware Software Development 60

Scott Lowe

FEBRUARY 9, 2018

Amit Aneja has a two-part series (so far) explaining the routing architecture in NSX-T (which brings multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud support to the NSX platform). Sam McGeown has a nice diagram of the communications channels between the various VMware NSX components. Servers/Hardware. Networking. Operating Systems/Applications.

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Network Storage 60

Scott Lowe

AUGUST 16, 2017

This is my irregularly-published collection of links and articles from around the Internet related to the major data center technologies: networking, hardware, security, cloud computing, applications/OSes, storage, and virtualization. Want to install VMware NSX in your home lab, but concerned about resource utilization? Networking.

Vmware 60

Vmware Storage Network Windows 60

Scott Lowe

MAY 27, 2022

Isovalent—the company behind the Cilium project—has been talking a lot about how the use of eBPF will transform things, including the architecture of a service mesh. Servers/Hardware. The state of virtualization on Apple Silicon hardware has seen a few developments in recent days and weeks. Networking.

Virtualization 79

Virtualization Storage Programming Network 79

Scott Lowe

OCTOBER 14, 2017

Romain Decker has an “under the hood” look at the VMware NSX load balancer. Servers/Hardware. Brendan Gregg has a pretty detailed write-up on migrating from Solaris to Linux (pertinent given the recent layoff of the majority of the Solaris developers). Richard Arnold shares some thoughts on VMware Cloud on AWS.

Load Balancer 60

Load Balancer Vmware Hardware Open Source 60

Scott Lowe

JANUARY 28, 2016

The rise of Linux in importance in the networking industry continues, with Arista announcing enhancements to Arista EOS to support—among other things—Docker containers. As a partial counterpoint to the increased use/visibility of Linux in the networking industry, check out Ivan’s take on Dell’s OS10 announcement. Servers/Hardware.

Vmware 60

Vmware Open Source Linux Devops 60

Scott Lowe

SEPTEMBER 3, 2013

VMware introduced VMware NSX recently at VMworld 2013. Servers/Hardware. Prasenjit Sarkar, who works in VMware R&D, and runs the Stretch Cloud site , has a write-up on using Data Center Extension (DCE) to VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). x that involves booting on a Linux CD. This looks interesting.

Vmware 60

Vmware Data Center Storage Disaster Recovery 60

Scott Lowe

OCTOBER 5, 2012

Some folks from Nicira (now part of VMware) recently published a blog post discussing the OVSDB IETF draft (see here ). Servers/Hardware. This is an awesome overview of the OpenStack Folsom architecture , courtesy of Ken Pepple. Networking Security Storage Virtualization Automation KVM Linux OpenStack OSS OVS vCloud VMware'

Storage 92

Storage Vmware Linux Virtualization 92

Scott Lowe

MARCH 8, 2016

PowerNSX is pretty cool—it’s a set of PowerShell cmdlets for administrators of VMware NSX running in vSphere environments. Tony Sangha has a nice article providing step-by-step instructions on setting up a site-to-site IPSec VPN between VMware NSX and a Cisco CSR 1000v. Servers/Hardware. Networking. Seen this ?

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Intel Network 60

Scott Lowe

JUNE 29, 2016

If you like geeking out over the hardware side of networking, you may find this Ars Technica article on the physical infrastructure of the global Internet to be an interesting read. (I Servers/Hardware. This is a highly technical article on scheduling in the Linux kernel , but it’s well worth reading. Virtualization.

Linux 60

Linux Network Hardware Vmware 60

Scott Lowe

JANUARY 6, 2018

Erik Hinderer takes a stab (based on his field experience) at estimating how long it takes to upgrade VMware NSX. Servers/Hardware. Christian Kellner talks about work done on Thunderbolt 3 security levels for GNU/Linux. Tony Bourke has a two-part series on ZFS and Linux and encryption ( part 1 , part 2 ). Virtualization.

Linux 60

Linux Vmware Comparison Network 60

Scott Lowe

MARCH 7, 2014

Jointly authored by VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Intel, this new protocol proposal attempts to bring together the strengths of the various network virtualization encapsulation protocols out there today (VXLAN, STT, NVGRE). Servers/Hardware. x86 marches on! If you’re looking to get some storage geek on, this is worth a read.

Virtualization 60

Virtualization Hardware Intel Vmware 60

Scott Lowe

FEBRUARY 2, 2017

Servers/Hardware. Flatpak is a (relatively) new application packaging/sandboxing mechanism for Linux applications. The post is a bit geeky but quite informative, and worth reading if SSH bastion hosts are a key part of your architecture. John Kozej has a write-up on an NSX logical switch packet walk.

Linux 60

Linux Network Virtualization IPv6 60

Cloud Musings

OCTOBER 28, 2016

You will learn how to painlessly deploy fairly complex applications that scale across multiple instances in cloud technologies including Windows Azure Chef, Chef Solo, Linux and Windows Tools.

Cloud 70

Cloud Web Services Hardware Software 70

Scott Lowe

MAY 12, 2016

I recently spoke at Interop 2016 in Las Vegas, and while I was there I scribbled down some notes pertaining to how decomposing applications into microservices-based architectures was similar in some respects to decomposing networks into an overlay network and an underlay (physical) network. Servers/Hardware. Networking. Virtualization.

Vmware 60

Vmware Windows Network Agile 60

Scott Lowe

MARCH 23, 2017

Servers/Hardware. As opposed to just encrypting data at the transport level (although Acra does that between components of its architecture) or just encrypting data at the storage level (using an encrypted file system or similar), Acra targets encrypting data at the table/row/column level within a database. Check back next time!

Open Source 60

Open Source Storage Vmware Network 60

Scott Lowe

MARCH 2, 2017

Servers/Hardware. For me, the key takeaway was that you need to carefully examine the architecture of your application(s) in order to understand where serverless (function-as-a-service) is the best fit. Here’s a walkthrough to install Arch Linux on VirtualBox. Thinking of virtualizing Linux on Hyper-V? What’s that?

Linux 60

Linux Devops Open Source Virtualization 60

Scott Lowe

OCTOBER 27, 2017

Servers/Hardware. I like this article on using Couchbase on AWS from Kubernetes because it addresses an often-overlooked (in my opinion) aspect of containerized/microservices architectures: they still need to communicate to external services. I suppose this is fully expected, given the impact of VMware and hypervisors.

Firewall 60

Firewall Virtualization Network Storage 60

Scott Lowe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Given my previous role at EMC (involved in storage) and my current role at VMware focused on network virtualization (which encompasses SDN), I was quite curious. This “overcommitment” technique could have some negative effects on existing monitoring systems that are unaware of the underlying hardware configuration.

Meeting 63

Meeting Storage Hardware Network 63

Scott Lowe

APRIL 3, 2016

Alban Crequy has a post on using Linux queueing disciplines (qdiscs, for short) to help with testing application behavior under degraded network conditions. Cumulus Networks has added another hardware partner to its list of supported hardware partners; this time it’s Mellanox, as outlined in this SDx Central article. Good stuff.

Vmware 60

Vmware Network Linux Hardware 60

Galido

MAY 1, 2019

Zero Day Blog from ZDNet helps you to stay on top of the latest in software/hardware security research, along with vulnerabilities, threats and computer attacks. Covering vista, Linux, Ubuntu, SQL server, mac os, enterprise, UNIX, open source, AMD, ERP – Techworld.com. Your gateway to the VMware universe. Zero Day from ZDNet.

Resources 107

Resources Mobile Data Center Security 107

Scott Lowe

MARCH 10, 2023

Servers/Hardware Kevin Houston provides some instructions on backing up the Dell PowerEdge MX7000 settings and configurations. Frank Denneman digs into Sapphire Rapids memory configurations (Sapphire Rapids is Intel’s 4th generation Scalable Processor Architecture). But then when is one of Ivan’s posts not a great read?

IPv6 74

IPv6 Linux Tools Network 74

Galido

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

Zero Day Blog from ZDNet helps you to stay on top of the latest in software/hardware security research, along with vulnerabilities, threats and computer attacks. Covering vista, Linux, Ubuntu, SQL server, mac os, enterprise, UNIX, open source, AMD, ERP – Techworld.com. Your gateway to the VMware universe. Zero Day from ZDNet.

Mobile 77

Mobile Data Center Security Virtualization 77

Scott Lowe

JANUARY 6, 2015

Michael Webster isn’t a name that normally pops up here in the Networking section of my Technology Short Takes, but he recently wrote an article on installing Cumulus Linux from a MacBook Pro that I thought might be handy. It would be cool if VMware would/could do the same with VMware NSX. Servers/Hardware.

Linux 60

Linux Dell Vmware Network 60

Scott Lowe

APRIL 21, 2016

Servers/Hardware. Although it’s not feature-complete (by a long shot), VMware recently open-sourced version 0.1 via VMware Photon OS TP2. This Yelp Engineering blog post talks about one of these unintended side effects (processes running as PID 1 are treated differently by the Linux kernel). Nothing this time around.

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Hardware Network 60

Scott Lowe

JUNE 11, 2014

Anthony Burke’s series on VMware NSX continues with part 5. Servers/Hardware. Tom has since moved on to CSC (via the vCHS team at VMware) and has launched a “next-generation” version of Razor called Hanlon. Here’s hoping you find something useful! Networking. I don’t know.

Vmware 60

Vmware Storage Network Virtualization 60

Data Center Knowledge

JULY 24, 2013

IBM said today that it will make CloudFoundry a component of its open cloud architecture and work with Pivotal on further development of the CloudFoundry open source project and establishing an open governance model for the community. Featured Cloud Articles. Latest AWS Price Cuts Target the Enterprise & the Competition.

Data Center 197

Data Center IBM Data Cloud 197

Scott Lowe

FEBRUARY 4, 2013

I think that’s the point Ivan tried to make as well—it’s the architecture and how OpenFlow is used that makes a difference. (Is Servers/Hardware. Cisco UCS is pretty cool in that it makes automation of compute hardware easier through such abstractions as server profiles. Is that a reasonable summary, Ivan?).

Vmware 115

Vmware Storage Virtualization Network 115

Scott Lowe

DECEMBER 6, 2012

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.)

Vmware 109

Vmware Virtualization Storage Hardware 109

Scott Lowe

JUNE 4, 2013

First up, Jason goes off on a rant about network virtualization , briefly hitting topics like the relationship between overlays and hardware, the role of hardware in network virtualization, the changing roles of data center professionals, and whether overlays are the next logical step in the evolution of the network. Servers/Hardware.

HP 106

HP Virtualization Hardware Network 106

Scott Lowe

DECEMBER 10, 2015

Servers/Hardware. This article provides a good introductory overview of Linux iptables commands for configuring host-based firewall rules on your Linux systems. This article provides a good introductory overview of Linux iptables commands for configuring host-based firewall rules on your Linux systems.

Windows 60

Windows Firewall Linux Architecture 60

Scott Lowe

MARCH 5, 2013

He starts out by discussing proactive vs. reactive flows , in which Brent explains that OpenFlow performance is less about OpenFlow and more about how flows are inserted into the hardware. Servers/Hardware. Well worth reading for VMware admins and architects. Overall, an excellent article, and one I highly recommend.

Virtualization 102

Virtualization Storage Vmware Network 102

Scott Lowe

JUNE 4, 2013

First up, Jason goes off on a rant about network virtualization , briefly hitting topics like the relationship between overlays and hardware, the role of hardware in network virtualization, the changing roles of data center professionals, and whether overlays are the next logical step in the evolution of the network. Servers/Hardware.

HP 61

HP Virtualization Hardware Network 61

Scott Lowe

SEPTEMBER 13, 2013

Rack Scale Architecture for Cloud: [link]. Enabling Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking with the Intel Open Network Platform Server Reference Architecture Design: [link]. Extend Intel’s reach with non-IA hardware (FM6000 series, QuickAssist Server Acceleration Card [QASAC].

Intel 60

Intel Network Architecture Virtualization 60