The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

Today on the Infotrek podcast, guest Juan Cruz joins us to talk about the new features of Windows Server 2016 and why we’re still waiting for it; all after we discuss the LinkedIN buy, Google Fiberless, and Chef’s new “Habitat.”

We discuss:

* Why is the GA release so late?

* Federation with non-AD identity management systems

* GUI is an install-able feature

* What are Storage Replicas?

* Faster reboots with “Soft Restart”?

* Automate your network with Network Controller?

* Hyper-V Features

* Nano Server (SWEET!)

* Shielded VMs

* Hot change memory and NICs on VMs

* Storage Resiliency

Your Hosts:

John W Kerns is a network and systems engineer based in the Los Angeles/San Diego area. His background is in two traditionally stovepiped skill sets; systems administration and switching/routing/security. Most of his time is spent as an implementation engineer for a medium sized VAR. You can visit his blog at blog.packetsar.com or follow him on Twitter @PackeTsar.

Derek Pocoroba is a Director of Enterprise Networking in the San Diego area. His background is heavy in enterprise networking and he holds CCIE #18559 Routing & Switching. Derek spends much of his time as a solutions architect, focusing on network architecture and design for his customers. You can visit his blog on PacketPushers and LinkedIN or follow him on Twitter @dpocoroba.

Mike Aossey is a Director of Practice Management in the Orange County, CA area. His background spans across many different technologies in IT, but he focuses mostly on collaboration and programming. Mike spends his time day to day overseeing SMEs and architecting VoIP solutions. You can visit his blog on  www.aossey.net or follow his rants on Twitter at @aossey.

Juan Cruz is a Partner Technology Strategist with Microsoft in the Orange County area. His background is Cloud Infrastructure and application virtualization. Juan spends much of his time working with Microsoft Partners build their Cloud Practices using Microsoft solutions. You can visit his page on LinkedIn.

 

The team is back to talk about the love/hate relationship with Change Management after we discuss Amazon’s new discovery service, an update on the 2012 LinkenIN hack, and how virtualization is over the hill.

We discuss:

* What is change management and what purpose does it serve?

* When is it in appropriate to use it and when it is inappropriate?

* What effect will DevOps have on change management? Doesn’t change management fly in the face of continuous delivery?

Your Hosts:

John W Kerns is a network and systems engineer based in the Los Angeles/San Diego area. His background is in two traditionally stovepiped skill sets; systems administration and switching/routing/security. Most of his time is spent as an implementation engineer for a medium sized VAR. You can visit his blog at blog.packetsar.com or follow him on Twitter @PackeTsar.

Derek Pocoroba is a Director of Enterprise Networking in the San Diego area. His background is heavy in enterprise networking and he holds CCIE #18559 Routing & Switching. Derek spends much of his time as a solutions architect, focusing on network architecture and design for his customers. You can visit his blog on PacketPushers and LinkedIN or follow him on Twitter @dpocoroba.

Mike Aossey is a Director of Practice Management in the Orange County, CA area. His background spans across many different technologies in IT, but he focuses mostly on collaboration and programming. Mike spends his time day to day overseeing SMEs and architecting VoIP solutions. You can visit his blog on  www.aossey.net or follow his rants on Twitter at @aossey.

The virtual switch in the hypervisor has been a highly competitive space for a number of years, with VMware’s Virtual Switch squaring off against Open vSwitch.

More recently, other initiatives like such as IO Visor have been attempting get away from perceived limitations. (You can listen to our podcast on the subject here.)

Meanwhile, open source projects like Romana, Project Calico and other are trying to avoid using a switch at all by using arcane methods.

Why all the fuss? Because the virtual switch is critical not only to connecting VMs to the network, but also because Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) means that our appliances will be running in KVM hypervisors on Linux.

We need a software networking edge that does the things we want.

Enter the FD.io project. This effort, originally undertaken by Cisco and now a collaborative project under the Linux Foundation, aims to accelerate software-based packet processing through a variety of initiatives, including a virtual switch/router called Vector Packet Processing (VPP).

Cisco contributed the initial VPP code to the Linux Foundation.

On this episode of Priority Queue, the Packet Pushers are joined by Dave Ward, Dave Barach, and Maciek Konstantynowicz from Cisco to talk about virtual switching, the open source project, and to get into detail about the capabilities of VPP.

Links:

FD.io Project

A bigger helping of Internet PLEASE! – Dave Ward’s detailed blog on FD.io and VPP ]()

What is VPP? – FD.io

User space – Wikipedia

PQ Show 84: Cloud Network Complexity Vs. Romana.io – Packet Pushers

PQ Show 60: The IO Visor Project And Linux Networking – Packet Pushers

The trio is back to talk about troubleshooting, how much fun it can be, and how to approach it, but first they share their widely respected opinions *scoff* about the ‘Race for the Container Space’, using DNA as your tier-4 storage media, and the promise of autonomous taxis.

[Editor’s note: This episode was originally recorded in May, but technical issues prevented it from being posted on Packet Pushers until June, making the news out of date. That’s on the Packet Pushers, not your podcast hosts.]

Your Hosts:

John W. Kerns is a network and systems engineer based in the Los Angeles/San Diego area. His background is in two traditionally stovepiped skill sets: systems administration and switching/routing/security. Most of his time is spent as an implementation engineer for a medium-sized VAR. You can visit his blog at blog.packetsar.com or follow him on Twitter at @PackeTsar.

Derek Pocoroba is a Director of Enterprise Networking in the San Diego area. His background is heavy in enterprise networking and he holds CCIE #18559 Routing & Switching. Derek spends much of his time as a solutions architect, focusing on network architecture and design for his customers. You can visit his blog on PacketPushers and LinkedIN or follow him on Twitter at @dpocoroba.

Mike Aossey is a Director of Practice Management in the Orange County, CA area. His background spans across many different technologies in IT, but he focuses mostly on collaboration and programming. Mike spends his time day to day overseeing SMEs and architecting VoIP solutions. You can visit his blog on www.aossey.net or follow his rants on Twitter at @aossey.

Links:

If you have been in a service desk role, you need to watch The Website is Down.

@dpocoroba’s troubleshooting article on PacketPushers.

Romana is an open-source project that tackles network and security issues for cloud-native applications.

Romana’s goal is to address these issues with the simplest possible solutions using technologies we’re all familiar with–no overlays required.

According to its Web site, Romana “automates the creation of isolated Cloud Native Networks and secures applications with a distributed firewall that applies access control policies consistently across all endpoints and services, wherever they run.”

Joining us on Priority Queue to talk about the project is Chris Marino. Chris is part of a team behind Romana, and the founder and CEO of Pani Networks. We’ll explore just what the Romana project is about, drill into its major components, and look at its integration with OpenStack and Kubernetes.

We’ll also play Devil’s advocate to look at limitations with the project. To get more details about Romana, check out the project’s blog.

Show Notes:

Section 1 – Are Cloud Native Networks Really That Complex?

* What do we mean when we say “cloud native network”?

* Not just private cloud, also public cloud

* The emerging container problem

* A common solution in this space is an overlay using VXLAN with an SDN controller.

* What does VXLAN do for us?

* How does the SDN controller fit in?

* So let’s do a multi-tenant packet walk

* How hard is it to troubleshoot this sort of architecture?

Section 2 – Introducing The Romana Project

* In a nutshell, what is the Romana project?

* Let’s discuss the IP scheme used

* 32 bits

* Break them up how you need

* By default, broken on the octet boundary

* Network, tenants, hosts, networks, endpoints

* Okay, so let’s talk through each of the components

* Route manager

* IPAM

* Service insertion

* Is there a Romana API?

* Explain how Romana integrates with OpenStack

* Explain how Romana integrates with Kubernetes

Section 3 – Devil’s Advocate

* I find your lack of scale disturbing

* I want to use IPv6 addressing instead of IPv4. When?

* vMotion. I really, really want that…

* Native IP with no encap makes me nervous. Why shouldn’t it?

* How do I explain Romana multi-tenancy to a security auditor?

* There is zero chance I’m going to use static routes. Will Romana integrate with my BGP or OSPF?

* How is Romana itself secured so that it’s not provisioning IPs for undesirable endpoints or hosts?

Agile is a set of principles for software development. If you’ve ever worked with developers or DevOps professionals you’ve probably encountered lots of Agile terminology.

But you don’t have to be a developer to benefit from Agile principles. Creative people can combine Agile concepts with engineering skills to solve problems. On today’s episode we’re joined by an experienced Agile coach and an IT recruiter to find out how Agile can improve IT infrastructure projects and careers.

Our guests are Jon Stahl, President of LeanDog and a distinguished Agile and Lean Coach; and Dawn Swit, a project management professor and owner and “Purveyor of Tech Talent” at Next IT Staffing.

You can listen to part 1 of our Agile series here.

Please note that this show was recorded from a floating office boat where LeanDog has its offices, so you may hear some of the background noises from the environment the audio.

Links:

Agile Discussion Guide – LeanDog

Next IT Staffing

The brave new world of networking services is automated, elastic, and chained.

That is to say, if you need to push traffic through a bunch of virtual middleboxes, you’re going to automate the creation of those middleboxes. Eventually, the days of standing up hardware services and plumbing them oh-so-carefully will be gone, because the world won’t wait for you to get it done. Automation is your answer.

And when you need to create more of them to support additional volume, the services will grow dynamically – more instances stood up and torn down as needed, depending on load.

And if you have a bunch of network services an application must pass through, you’ll set up traffic patterns in a service chain so that traffic flows through the virtual network services they need to without you having to rely on physical plumbing and clever routing.

All of this happens today in the worlds of OpenStack, containers, NFV, and microservices. In other words, this isn’t the “unicorn networking no one uses” that some of you complain about. This is real stuff.

To discuss microservice orchestration for networking is our sponsor, Sonus Networks. Bryan Hill, Vice President, Platform Engineering, joins us from Sonus to explore what microservices mean and how they are linked together in a cloud architecture.

We’ll also get into details about the orchestration mechanisms within OpenStack, discuss an OpenStack reference model, talk about how virtual network functions (VNFs) and microservices relate, and review several use cases.

Link:

ETSI OpenStack Reference Model (PDF)

Here on the Priority Queue, we’re soaring over the campus, buoyed aloft by 2.4 and 5 gigahertz radio waves carrying us to the land of Aruba Networks’ wireless certifications.

Aruba offers a plethora of certifications, and now that Aruba is part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, those certs become part of the wider HPE certification ecosystem.

Kimberly Graves is here to chat with us about the Aruba Networks certification ladder. She’ll discuss why to certify on Aruba gear, what you’ll learn, and offer training and testing insights. Kimberly is a wireless network engineer and security consultant, and is currently a senior course and exam developer at Aruba. You can follow her on Twitter at @kimberlyagraves.

Show Notes:

Section 1 – Why Certify On Aruba Gear?

* Will I learn wireless fundamentals?

* Are there a lot Aruba installations out there that need certified people?

* Will my Aruba certs help me operate non-Aruba wireless networks?

Section 2 – Certification Levels And Tracks

* What are the main levels of certification (associate, professional, expert, etc.)?

* What are the major certification tracks?

* Which tracks are seeing the most growth or demand from the industry?

Section 3 – Training, Testing And Costs

* Will I be able to get certified without hands-on training? If not, how can I fix that?

* I’m a self-paced learner. What resources are available to me?

* Books

* Training

* Community

* Is there a recommended minimum spec for a home lab?

* I like to go to class. What are my options?

* Online

* Brick & mortar

* How are tests administered?

* Lower-level exams

* Expert exams

* Between training and testing, how much is this all going to cost?

There are many pop-culture references to the phrase ‘Army of One’, including the Coldplay song, the United States Army recruitment slogan, and Clint Eastwood in the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales.

For today’s episode of The Next Level, we’re using the phrase to describe an IT pro who has to do a little bit of everything, from networking to systems administration to setting up new applications to security and more. These pros have the dedication and grit to stick to their beliefs, the fortitude to hold the line in the face of overwhelming odds, and the skills to get the job done.

You might be an army of one because of the size of the organization you work for, or because of an emergency situation where you had to step up to a challenge.

Join forces with us as we speak with industry veterans Brian Harrington, Jim Whalen, and Jim Kennedy about what it means to be an army of one.

Links:

Patch Management mailing list

myITforum email list

Dale Carnegie sales and communications training

Literally, Figuratively Speaking podcast

The CLEcast podcast

John, Derek, Mike, and Steven are back with the Infotrek podcast to finish up the topic of small shop design (hear part 1 here), but only after they review the weekly news: Goodbye Yahoo, hello Openstack alternate to vBlock, and Google apparently fails at config automation.

[Editor’s note: This episode was originally recorded in April, but technical issues prevented it from being posted on Packet Pushers until June, making the news out of date. That’s on us, not the podcast hosts.]

Your Hosts:

John W. Kerns is a network and systems engineer based in the Los Angeles/San Diego area. His background is in two traditionally stovepiped skill sets: systems administration and switching/routing/security. Most of his time is spent as an implementation engineer for a medium-sized VAR. You can visit his blog at blog.packetsar.com or follow him on Twitter at @PackeTsar.

Derek Pocoroba is a Director of Enterprise Networking in the San Diego area. His background is heavy in enterprise networking and he holds CCIE #18559 Routing & Switching. Derek spends much of his time as a solutions architect, focusing on network architecture and design for his customers. You can visit his blog on PacketPushers and LinkedIN or follow him on Twitter at @dpocoroba.

Mike Aossey is a Director of Practice Management in the Orange County, CA area. His background spans across many different technologies in IT, but he focuses mostly on collaboration and programming. Mike spends his time day to day overseeing SMEs and architecting VoIP solutions. You can visit his blog on www.aossey.net or follow his rants on Twitter at @aossey.

Steven Sedory is a small business owner based out of Chino California. His company, Vertical Computers, provides managed IT services, as well has VoIP and cloud hosting solutions. His background is in systems administration and small business systems architecture. You can visit his website at verticalcomputers.com.

Show Notes:

* Compute (Hyper-V? VMWare? Maybe KVM?)

* Storage (FreeNAS and OpenFiler can be good options)

* Collaboration (IM, Email, VOIP…)

* Security (Just go find PacketPushers Show 260 with Jay Swan)