Scott Lowe

MARCH 16, 2018

Servers/Hardware. Operating Systems/Applications. Adrian Hornsby has a series (two parts so far) on designing a multi-region active-active architecture. The focus of this series seems to be more on application architecture than infrastructure architecture, although there are clear overlaps in areas.

Architecture 60

Architecture Meeting Storage Hardware 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. Operating Systems/Applications. Networking. network virtualization). Programming. Virtualization. Career/Soft Skills.

Virtualization 79

Virtualization Storage Programming Network 79

Scott Lowe

DECEMBER 6, 2013

A fan of network virtualization might also say that decomposing today’s complex physical networks into multiple simple logical networks on top of a simpler physical transport network—similar to Mike’s suggestion of converging on a smaller set of reference architectures—might also help. (Of Servers/Hardware.

Vmware 60

Vmware Storage Linux Network 60

Scott Lowe

OCTOBER 14, 2017

Romain Decker has an “under the hood” look at the VMware NSX load balancer. Servers/Hardware. Operating Systems/Applications. Vladan Seget shares how to create a VMware ESXi ISO image with the latest patches. Richard Arnold shares some thoughts on VMware Cloud on AWS. Nothing this time (sorry!).

Load Balancer 60

Load Balancer Vmware Hardware Open Source 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. Networking.

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Architecture Hardware 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 9, 2014

Rob Sherwood, CTO of Big Switch, recently published a reasonably in-depth look at “modern OpenFlow” implementations and how they can leverage multiple tables in hardware. It sounds like Ivan favors scale-out architectures, not scale-up architectures (which are typically what is seen in centralized control plane deployments).

Vmware 60

Vmware Storage HP Virtualization 60

Scott Lowe

AUGUST 27, 2021

Servers/Hardware. This is an interesting deep dive into Intel’s “Ice Lake” Xeon SP architecture. Operating Systems/Applications. Eric Sloof has information on how to disable VMware plugins in vCenter Server (the context of the article is security vulnerabilities disclosed in plugins).

Linux 90

Linux Load Balancer Malware Virtualization 90

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. Operating Systems/Applications.

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Network Storage 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. Operating Systems/Applications. x86 marches on!

Virtualization 60

Virtualization Hardware Intel Vmware 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). Operating Systems/Applications. This looks interesting.

Vmware 60

Vmware Data Center Storage Disaster Recovery 60

Scott Lowe

FEBRUARY 11, 2016

see below in the “Operating Systems/Applications” section), Metaswitch has announced a Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugin for Project Calico. Servers/Hardware. Colin Lynch gives a “first look” at the Cisco UCS Generation 3 hardware , which may be of interest if you’re a UCS customer or looking at purchasing UCS.

Vmware 60

Vmware Network Operating Systems Virtualization 60

Scott Lowe

JANUARY 28, 2016

Granted, it’s a VMware post, so it may gloss over some details, but it’s still a decent look at what’s possible when you take the abstractions and APIs offered by a solution like NSX. Servers/Hardware. Operating Systems/Applications. CoreOS rkt is coming along nicely; version 0.15.0 GitHub would be a good way.

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Open Source Devops 60

Scott Lowe

MARCH 10, 2015

Anthony Burke (disclaimer: Anthony works for VMware in the NSBU) has a post on how to use Python to automate the bulk creation of firewall rules for use with the VMware NSX distributed firewall. You may have heard about the “6-pack”, Facebook’s new open modular hardware switch introduced recently ( here’s a post on it ).

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Hardware Software Development 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 8, 2016

PowerNSX is pretty cool—it’s a set of PowerShell cmdlets for administrators of VMware NSX running in vSphere environments. Cue the round of folks claiming that this is why proprietary network operating systems [NOSes] are the route the networking industry should be taking.). Servers/Hardware. Seen this ?

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Intel Network 60

Scott Lowe

AUGUST 27, 2021

Servers/Hardware. This is an interesting deep dive into Intel’s “Ice Lake” Xeon SP architecture. Operating Systems/Applications. Eric Sloof has information on how to disable VMware plugins in vCenter Server (the context of the article is security vulnerabilities disclosed in plugins).

Linux 60

Linux Load Balancer Malware Virtualization 60

Scott Lowe

JANUARY 28, 2016

Granted, it’s a VMware post, so it may gloss over some details, but it’s still a decent look at what’s possible when you take the abstractions and APIs offered by a solution like NSX. Servers/Hardware. Operating Systems/Applications. CoreOS rkt is coming along nicely; version 0.15.0 GitHub would be a good way.

Vmware 60

Vmware Open Source Linux Devops 60

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

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. Operating Systems/Applications. Networking. Cloud Computing/Cloud Management.

Storage 92

Storage Vmware Linux Virtualization 92

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. Operating Systems/Applications. Perhaps I should remove this section?

Firewall 60

Firewall Virtualization Network Storage 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. When you’re operating at the scale at which Netflix operates, this is no trivial feat. Servers/Hardware. Operating Systems/Applications. recently hit 1.0,

Linux 60

Linux Vmware Comparison 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. Operating Systems/Applications. Patrick Ogenstad outlines what’s involved with managing Cisco IOS upgrades with Ansible.

Linux 60

Linux Network Hardware Vmware 60

Scott Lowe

JUNE 21, 2019

Servers/Hardware. Software company Agile Bits recently announced support for U2F-compatible hardware security keys in their 1Password product. Operating Systems/Applications. Systango has this high-level overview of serverless application architecture along with some pros/cons, use cases, etc. Virtualization.

Network 60

Network Load Balancer Storage Applications 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. At that point, the system DRAM almost looks like another level of cache. Jeda Networks describes themselves as a “software-defined storage networking” company.

Meeting 63

Meeting Storage Hardware Network 63

Galido

MAY 1, 2019

These areas of tech include general IT and technology, security, IT feeds, cloud computing, data center, mobile, social media, tips and tricks, virtualization, and operating system and software blogs. Operating System & Software Blogs. TechWorld – Operating Systems. CIO Dashboard. Zero Day from ZDNet.

Resources 107

Resources Mobile Data Center Security 107

Scott Lowe

MARCH 2, 2017

Servers/Hardware. Operating Systems/Applications. 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. “The What’s that? You haven’t heard of PowerNSX before? See here.).

Linux 60

Linux Devops Open Source Virtualization 60

Galido

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

These areas of tech include general IT and technology, security, IT feeds, cloud computing, data center, mobile, social media, tips and tricks, virtualization, and operating system and software blogs. Operating System & Software Blogs. TechWorld – Operating Systems. CIO Dashboard. Zero Day from ZDNet.

Mobile 77

Mobile Data Center Security Virtualization 77

Scott Lowe

FEBRUARY 2, 2017

Servers/Hardware. Operating Systems/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. Sam McGeown discusses deploying ECMP with NSX for a provider logical router.

Linux 60

Linux Network Virtualization IPv6 60

CIO Business Intelligence

JUNE 22, 2022

As VMware has observed , “In simple terms, a DPU is a programable device with hardware acceleration as well as having an ARM CPU complex capable of processing data. In other words, adding DPUs is like de-bottlenecking at data centers, providing more fire power and performance with the same CPU architecture.” .

Data Center 134

Data Center Data Architecture Fractional CTO 134

Dataconomy

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

With server virtualization, you can easily create, move, and delete virtual servers as needed, without the need for expensive hardware upgrades or complex reconfigurations. One of the key benefits of server virtualization is that it allows for more efficient use of hardware resources.

Virtualization 78

Virtualization Storage Hardware Disaster Recovery 78

Scott Lowe

APRIL 3, 2016

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. Servers/Hardware. VMware recently released version 0.8 The latest buzzword to hit the industry is “serverless architecture.” Highly recommended reading!

Vmware 60

Vmware Network Linux Hardware 60

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

Scott Lowe

JUNE 11, 2014

Anthony Burke’s series on VMware NSX continues with part 5. Servers/Hardware. Operating Systems/Applications. 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.

Vmware 60

Vmware Storage Network Virtualization 60

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. Operating Systems/Applications.

Vmware 115

Vmware Storage Virtualization Network 115

Scott Lowe

APRIL 21, 2016

Servers/Hardware. Operating Systems/Applications. Although it’s not feature-complete (by a long shot), VMware recently open-sourced version 0.1 via VMware Photon OS TP2. GitHub recently changed their storage architecture, using a Git-based solution called DGit. Nothing this time around. Maybe next time!

Vmware 60

Vmware Linux Hardware Network 60

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. Operating Systems/Applications. Cloud Computing/Cloud Management.

Vmware 109

Vmware Virtualization Storage Hardware 109