Technology Short Take #34
Published on 22 Jul 2013 · Filed in Information · 990 words (estimated 5 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #34, my latest collection of links, articles, thoughts, and ideas from around the web, centered on key data center technologies. Enjoy!
Networking
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Henry Louwers has a nice write-up on some of the design considerations that go into selecting a Citrix NetScaler solution.
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Scott Hogg explores jumbo frames and their benefits/drawbacks in a clear and concise manner. It’s worth reading if you aren’t familiar with jumbo frames and some of the considerations around their use.
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The networking “old guard” likes to talk about how x86 servers and virtualization create network bottlenecks due to performance concerns, but as Ivan points out in this post, it’s rapidly becoming—or has already become—a non-issue. (By the way, if you’re not already reading all of Ivan’s content, you need to be. Seriously.)
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Greg Ferro, aka EtherealMind, has a great series of articles on overlay networking (a component technology used in a number of network virtualization solutions). Greg starts out with a quick look at the value prop for overlay networking. In addition to highlighting one key value of overlay networking—that decoupling the logical network from the physical network enables more rapid change and innovation—Greg also establishes that overlay networking is not new. Greg continues with a more detailed look at how overlay networking works. Finally, Greg takes a look at whether overlay networking and the physical network should be integrated; he arrives at the conclusion that integrating the two is likely to be unsuccessful given the history of such attempts in the past.
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Terry Slattery ruminates on the power of creating (and using) the right abstraction in networking. The value of the “right abstraction” has come up a number of times; it was a featured discussion point of Martin Casado’s talk at the OpenStack Summit in Portland in April, and takes center stage in a recent post over at Network Heresy.
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Here’s a decent two-part series about running Vyatta on VMware Workstation (part 1 and part 2).
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Could we use OpenFlow to build better internet exchanges? Here’s one idea.
Servers/Hardware
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The Dell VRTX made its debut recently. Kevin Houston has three blog posts that provide some additional information on VRTX: a quick video introduction, a more detailed look, and a demonstration of how quiet the VRTX is.
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In this post, William Lam explores the potential benefits of Intel’s VMCS Shadowing functionality on nested virtualization.
Security
I have nothing to share this time around, but I’ll keep watch for content to include in future Technology Short Takes.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
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Tom Fojta takes a look at integrating vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) with vCloud Director in this post. (By the way, congrats to Tom on becoming the first VCDX-Cloud!)
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In case you missed it, here’s the recording for the #vBrownBag session with Jon Harris on vCAC. (I had the opportunity to hear Jon speak about his employer’s vCAC deployment and some of the lessons learned at a recent New Mexico VMUG meeting.)
Operating Systems/Applications
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Need to do some port forwarding on a Linux box and want to automate the configuration with Puppet? Here’s a configuration example.
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Nick Buraglio provides some quick-and-dirty instructions for building FlowVisor on CentOS 6.
Storage
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Rawlinson Rivera starts to address a lack of available information about Virsto in the first of a series of posts on VMware Virsto. This initial post provides an introduction to Virsto; future posts will provide more in-depth technical details (which is what I’m really looking forward to getting).
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Nigel Poulton talks a bit about target driven zoning, something I’ve mentioned before on this site. For more information on target driven zoning (also referred to as peer zoning), also be sure to check out Erik Smith’s blog.
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Now that he’s had some time to come up to speed in his new role, Frank Denneman has started a great series on the basic elements of PernixData’s Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP). You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. I’m looking forward to future parts in this series.
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I’d often wondered this myself, and now Cormac Hogan has the answer: why is uploading files to VMFS so slow? Good information.
Virtualization
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Looks like Hyper-V supports an out-of-band initial replication method for Hyper-V Replica. I can see where this would be quite useful in some situations.
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Gabrie van Zanten shows how to add the Fusion IO driver to VMware AutoDeploy in this write-up. Thanks Gabe!
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Interested in running RHEV as a nested VM on ESXi? William Lam shows you how. William has been posting some great stuff recently; in addition to the nested RHEV article I just referenced, you might also be interested in his quick-start guide for OpenStack on vSphere, or his 2 part series on forwarding VM logs to syslog (part 1 and part 2).
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Itzik Reich provides some tips for tuning I/O on XenServer when working with EMC XtremIO arrays.
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Some good information here from Jason Boche on vCloud Director, RHEL 6.3, and Windows Server 2012 NFS.
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Here’s a quick note from Eric Gray on automating the VMware Tools install on Ubuntu 12.04.
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Josh Townsend has an updated version of his HAProxy virtual appliance available.
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PowerCLI guru Luc Dekens has a pair of PowerCLI scripts to help with common homelab tasks: a script to clone a VM without vCenter, and a script to create a nested ESXi hypervisor.
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Setting a Hyper-V VM to use a wide-screen resolution is actually pretty easy, based on Ben Armstrong’s instructions here.
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For beginners, here’s a write-up on using Fusion to build a vSphere lab.
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Another good post by Cormac Hogan answering some questions about SIOC.
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New network port diagram for vSphere 5.x? Get it here.
It’s time to wrap up now, or this Technology Short Take is going to turn into a Technology Long Take. Anyway, I hope you found something useful in this little collection. If you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement for future posts, feel free to speak up in the comments below.