The original version of TextMate had a very wide array of bundles (called tmbundles) that extended its functionality. When TextMate2 was released, it did not have the ability to import older bundles written for version 1.

It does ship with a large amount of built in bundles, however Puppet and Chef don’t ship by default. So, instead of pretty highlighting calling out syntax errors that you have made (or showing how awesome as job you have done) you get a bland white output show below.

Enter in Matthew Barr and is super awesome Puppet CI work. Very specifically, his puppet TextMate Bundle that works with TextMate2 - https://github.com/matthewbarr/puppet-textmate.tmbundle

Installation is pretty simple (you don’t have to use git if you don’t want).

1. Click on the ZIP button to download
2. Unzip the file puppet-textmate.tmbundle-master.zip
3. Rename the resulting folder from puppet-textmate.tmbundle-master  to puppet-textmate.tmbundle
4. Double click on the file puppet-textmate.tmbundle to import

Now that you have that installed. You now can choose puppet the puppet module instead of plain yet and you end up with beautifully highlighted code.

Resources -

TextMate2 – Open Source Text Editor  – http://macromates.com/

Matthew Barr’s TextMate2 Puppet bundle – https://github.com/matthewbarr/puppet-textmate.tmbundle

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• Setting up Cobbler PXE auto-deployment for Ubuntu Server 12.04 Precise

--Colin McNamara

Puppet syntax highlighting using TextMate2

I’ll be continuing my habit of tilting at windmills (ask @jdooley_clt if you are curious), with the goal of getting state and local agencies to adopt modern software development methodologies (Agile) on OpenSource platforms such as OpenStack.

What is IPMA

The Mission of the IPMA is to help maintain Washington State’s position as the nation’s premier IT state by continuing to advance the quality and professionalism of the Washington State Government IT community. The IPMA is dedicated to:

• Promoting professional networking among state government IT managers, business leaders and IT industry leaders
• Enhancing the IT community’s teamwork, collaboration and communications across Washington State agencies
• Providing professional development opportunities for the state’s IT leaders, managers and technical staff that focus on:
  • Developing and enhancing key IT skills
  • Expanding leadership and managerial competency
  • Providing visibility to important IT technologies and their successful application
• Sponsoring events that support the state’s emerging business issues

 

What will I be speaking about

Session Link:

 http://www.ipma-wa.com/event/2013-ipma-forum/agenda/Bus09

Session title: 

Integrating it all: Apps, Data, Mobile, E-commerce and the Cloud

Targeted audience:  

Application Architects, Systems Architects Technical Managers and individual contributors

Speaker(s) name and title: 

Colin McNamara, Nexus IS,  is a seasoned professional with over 15 years’ experience with network and systems technologies

Session description:

           In the transition to cloud computing, a new class of application design patterns have emerged. These application structures closely rely on public and private cloud platforms such as Amazon and OpenStack. In this session we will discuss the key drivers causing this shift, the platforms to support it, as well as key technical, organizational and cultural changes to support these cloud computing applications and platforms.

Lessons to be learned:

Understand how private cloud platforms like OpenStack fit in your e-commerce, mobile and “cloud” application strategy. Understand how the importance of Continuous Delivery tools in this ecosystem. Understand the organization and project management  structures necessary to deliver and support next generation cloud applications

How can you get hold of me while I’m out here

The best way of getting hold of me while I’m at a conference is pinging me on twitter – @colinmcnamara or swing by the Nexus booth on the show floor and ask someone to hunt me me down.

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• OpenStack Summit Fall 2012 Day 2 – Where is colin
• OpenStack summit Schedule – Thursday – Focusing on Swift Object Storage
• My Schedule – OpenStack summit day 3
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• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead
• Come to my session on surviving your first commit at OpenStack summit

--Colin McNamara

Speaking at IPMA tomorrow on OpenStack, DevOps and Continuous Delivery

DONATE HERE

Please support me with a donation to the St. Baldrick’s Foundation. This volunteer-driven charity funds more in childhood cancer research grants than any organization except the U.S. government.

Your gift will give hope to infants, children, teens and young adults fighting childhood cancers. So when I ask for your support, I’m really asking you to support these kids. Thank you!

I’ve thrown the first 100 into the till, and have a couple hundred left to throw in tonight. If you can, throw a couple bucks to the donation link and help us to end childhood cancer

DONATE HERE

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--Colin McNamara

Shaving my head for Cancer – Join the fight

What is Network Field Day? It is a group of independent network experts that blog, tweet, podcast and occasionally do incredibly useful things with complex network environments. We get to grill the technology companies on their networking technologies, and share our thoughts with the world. (via blogs and the live stream available below).

Schedule of presentations

Live Streaming Video (running during presentations) -

Tech Field Day Delegates – My peers this week

	Brandon Carroll	@BrandonCarroll
	CCIE Instructor, Blogger, and Technology Enthusiast
	Brent Salisbury	@NetworkStatic
	Brent Salisbury works as a Network Architect, CCIE #11972.
	Colin McNamara	@ColinMcNamara
	Colin McNamara is a seasoned professional with over 15 years experience with network and systems technologies.
	Ethan Banks	@ECBanks
	Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, is a hands-on networking practitioner who has designed, built and maintained networks for higher education, state government, financial institutions, and technology corporations.
	Greg Ferro	@EtherealMind
	Over the last twenty odd years, Greg has worked Sales, Technical and IT Management but mostly he delivers Network Architecture and Design. Today he works as a Freelance Consultant for F100 companies in the UK & Europe focussing on Data Centres, Security and Operational Automation.
	John Herbert	@MrTugs
	John has worked in the networking industry for 14 years, and obtained his CCIE Routing & Switching in early 2001.
	Jon Langemak	@blinken_lichten
	Jon Langemak is a Network Engineer, tech blogger, and dedicated tech enthusiast.
	Josh O’Brien	@JoshOBrien77
	Josh has worked in the industry for 14 years and is now serving as CTO in the Telemedicine sector.
	Paul Stewart	@PacketU
	Paul Stewart is a Network and Security Engineer, Trainer and Blogger who enjoys understanding how things really work.
	Pete Welcher	@pjwelcher
	Pete is a 15+ year CCIE who loves network design, and is currently avidly learning various datacenter technologies.
	Terry Slattery
	Terry Slattery, CCIE #1026, is a senior network engineer with decades of experience in the internetworking industry.
	Tom Hollingsworth	@NetworkingNerd
	Tom Hollingsworth, CCIE #29213, is a Senior Solutions Architect for a small VAR focusing primarily on K-12 education.

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--Colin McNamara

Come learn with me – Network Field Day 5

If you think these will be of value to the community, please use your vote to ensure that they will get on the schedule (click on the link tittles to get to the voting pages). 

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• Come to my session on surviving your first commit at OpenStack summit
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• OpenStack summit Schedule – Thursday – Focusing on Swift Object Storage

--Colin McNamara

OpenStack presentations to vote for – Shameless pandering

First things first – Search your email for a email titled “OpenStack Foundation – 2013 Individual Director Election” from secretary@openstack.org . It will have a click through link with your userid/pass to The OpenStack Election Voting Page  This is the email with your link to vote in the OpenStack Elections. As with democratic any process, voting is your chance to have your voice heard.

#### UPDATE ####

It has come to my attention that some people are having problems voting. If you haven’t received your voting email from the foundation please contact secretary@openstack.org and they will rectify the situation.

#### End UPDATE ####

As I am writing this article, I am sitting on a plane headed back home from Denver. I was out here helping Scott Lowe (EMC) and Shannon McFarland(Cisco)  help kick off [present at] Denver’s OpenStack meetup group.

Colin Presenting at Minnesota OpenStack Meetup Group

The presentation I am gave is one that I have given quite a few times now. It is titled “Surviving your first commit – an engineers guide to contributing to OpenStack”. It is a collection of lessons learned in my own journey with OpenStack. It is an attempt to remove barriers to contributing, and also to encourage community participation and adoption. The first time I presented on this subject was at the OpenStack design summit in San Diego. The original purpose was breaking down barriers to utilizing and contributing to OpenStack. However as I was developing my message and collecting the lessons learned I found that the most important element to success was organizing communities.

This was a lesson that I learned in the late 90′s when I first got introduced to Linux. I remember the first time I received Linux install media. I tried to install it and failed. A couple months later, a couple of us friends got together and got through our first install. Shortly after I had the web hosting at the ISP I ran (DKAOnline) migrated to Apache on Linux. By coming together as a community of geeks, we were able to lower the barriers of entry of Open Source software and get to a point where I could use Linux and other OpenSource software to power my business. (While I moved to the SF Bay long ago, the roots of that users group still lives on in Fresno as the Fresno Open Source Users Group).

I have carried that lesson forward throughout my entire lifetime in technology. Helping others helps yourself. Contributing to, and encouraging the creation of active user groups around emerging technologies is key to both your and the project you are working on a success. Increasing the use of a project creates a cycle that results in more companies with real world problems contributing back patches and fixes, improving the project in a way that is increasingly more relevant to all.

All of this user community talk centers around a key thought -

“What value can I bring to the OpenStack community and the foundation if I am elected to the individual board”

There are lots of things I CAN do and want to do. But it is important to consider WHAT I AM and HAVE BEEN doing. Over the past year or so I have been doing the following -

1. Evangelizing and increasing the adoption of OpenStack in user community through social media and the communities that I participate in.

2. Teaching people and companies about how to best contribute to OpenStack

3. Supporting and encouraging individuals in my own company (Nexus) to contribute to OpenStack as well as using it in our platforms.

4. Using my influence to educate hardware manufacturers on why the should ensure that their products are cleanly integrated with OpenStack as well educating and encourage them to commit development resources to the project.

5. Providing feedback from an Operators perspective to the board and developers.

6. Playing “Johnny Appleseed” helping people set up OpenStack meetup groups throughout the Nation

Right now I am an active member of the community, and wish to contribute more. I believe that Open Software and Standards are key to our technology industry being successful in the long run. The success of OpenStack and the OpenStack Foundation is key to making that happen.

I am doing what I can as an individual member of the foundation, as well as a leader in my own business to make this happen. My ask to you, is to help me take my contributions to the community to the next level by electing me to the individual board. 

The week of January 14-18 you have the chance to help me make this happen by voting for me to be an individual member of the OpenStack Foundation Board. If you believe in what I am currently doing, and want to help me do more, please do me a favor and cast your vote for me in the election.

Resources -

OpenStack Elections Candidate Page – http://www.openstack.org/election/2013-board-election/

OpenStack Elections Direct link (Need link from email to vote) – https://www.bigpulse.com/p22034/

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--Colin McNamara

What is my value to the OpenStack community, and why you should vote for me in this weeks elections – UPDATED

Colin is a candidate in the 2013 Board Election.

Read the Q&A below and see if you want to Nominate Colin in this election.

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--Colin McNamara

HELP – Nominate me for the OpenStack election

Changing IT consumption models – what is is driving the Pivotal initiative

First things first, we are in the middle of a couple SIGNIFICANT transitions in our industry. Many people call this cloud computing, but it is much larger then that.

What we are truly in the middle in is a shift of the consumption model of IT resources. For the past ten to fifteen years consumption and spend has been centered in and around IT organizations, generally under the command and control of a CIO. These organizations would work with the business, and sometimes the applications teams to capture requirements and create infrastructure to service their internal customers needs.

Over the past ten year so so (really since SOX)  the focus of many it organizations has shifted from Information Technology, to Infrastructure Technology. Significant amounts of time focus and budget (commonly measured at north of 60-70%) of most IT organizations are spent just keeping the lights on. This creates limited additional value to the companies that they are part of, as most importantly, is now a key limiter in application development and release cycles (the true lifeblood of many companies – their ACTUAL product).

The rise in power and maturity of software development

This slow old IT worked in the past when software development life cycles were also old and slow. Classic SDLC based development shops would sometimes take years to release code. In this world, slow and bloated infrastructure operations organizations (classic IT) was not the roadblock. Everything was fine.

Over the past few years however, things like Agile Software Development has taken the world by storm. In this world, development teams release code weekly, if not daily. This code is of higher quality, and more feature rich then ever before.

What this has caused, is an imbalance between the needs of software development organizations and the capabilities of the IT organizations that support them. To meet that need, many development organizations looked to companies that could provide “Agile infrastructure”. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of these companies, and has seen extreme growth because they can serve this need.

Cloud Computing is the first shift – DevOps / NoOps is the next 

Cloud computing, defined as the programatic, fractional consumption of elastic services (Amazon Web Services as ONE of the providers of this) is the first mega growth area that has benefited from this development shift.

It is however still not super simple for developer to write code for Amazon, or free OpenSource Amazon “Clones” like Eucalyptus and OpenStack. They have to have a level of knowledge of how to consume, manage, monitor and scale the services offered from these providers.

Remember, the goal of any development organization is to abstract complexity from the underlying layers of the App. IaaS  tools and platforms with good web services interfaces are only the first step in making this happen.

Enter the PaaS stacks – the cloud for cloud

PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a layer that runs on top of cloud platforms. Generally PaaS stacks abstract all the unique features of any cloud platform, allowing a developer just just focus on writing good functional code. The PaaS stack then handles connections to database services, autoscaling, etc (example is CloudFoundry and BOSH).

This abstracts the cloud provider, and sets the foundation for true cloud mobility. This I believe is the future, and will be the path to large scale cloud adoption.

Where does Greenplum and Analytics fit into this?

Data Science is the next great application consumer. Organizations that employ data science as part of their business process create and consume EMENSE amounts of data. Needless to say, companies like EMC love this. You do eventually have to put that data somewhere…

What does EMC / VMware’s Pivotal initiative mean in this context

Open software and PaaS stacks are clearly the future consumption target for the evolved development team. The challenge is that this is because Open Source software is also free software (at least partly). Big publicly traded companies have a real problem executing on both developing, and integrating free software into their sales models.

In some companies, like EMC. I hear that it actually is impossible to release Open Source code written in certain business units. The problem with this is, that releasing certain software into the wild for free actually drives consumption of big expensive blinking enterprise hardware.

Creating a new company, filled with talent focused on PaaS and Open Source is Brilliant 

1,400 employees are supposed to join this new company (Pivotal for now), focused on PaaS, Analytics at scale and Open Source. This positions Pivotal (or whatever it will be called) to be a dominant player in this shift in consumption models. It allows EMC to stay relevant as classic storage becomes passé and compute can in any location, ALSO including your data center.

Remember when EMC bought VMware

Nobody understood what was going on when EMC bought VMware. What they were really doing was ensuring that a new consumption model that would grow demand for their product sets would thrive. It also creating a landing spot for some of the brightest minds in the industry (Remember, Chad and the vSpecialist teams came out of there). Pivotal initiative provides the same play in the “new world” of IT.

What does this mean to you

This industry is changing, at an amazing pace. The classic world of IT is evaporating, and forming into something amazingly interesting and relevant. EMC has gone all in now, and committed and amazing number of resources to making true cloud application consumption “normal”. This will provide with each and every one of us new tools and techniques to use, and also learn.

With all shifts, some people and teams will rise, some will get left behind. My advice, pick up the old programming books, and start to think like a developer… because that is where our world is going.

 Similar Posts:

• My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack
• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead
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--Colin McNamara

EMC and VMware launching the Pivotal Initiative – The larger Picture

11/21 5:00PM turkey is brined and then thrown in a 5 gallon water cooler to soak up all the goodness. For the brine I used Alton Browns recipe.

11/22 7:30 am natural chunk charcoal added and lit in 4 separate corners of the big green egg

11/22 7:41am removed the turkey from the brine. Filled a bag full of ice and threw it on the breast of the turkey. This is a dirty little trick to allow the legs and breast to come to temperature at the same time.

11/22 8:00am the stoker Internet connected BBQ controller is now in command of the oxygen levels entering the BGE.

11/22 8:56am our 22lb turkey is now sitting in its new home for the next 5 hours. I have noticed that the stoker isn't updating to @netbbq. I will have to troubleshoot that now that the turkey is roasting.

11/22 11:30am turkey temp alarm went off. Apparently the turkey will be done early. Time to let the bird rest for a 1/2 hour then carve.

11/22 12:12 pm Turkey carved and ready to go.

11/22 12:19pm quick video conference with family abroad and then down to eat our meal

11/22 2:16pm Started the day with Johnny Walker Blue, ended it with Blueberry Moonshine and football

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--Colin McNamara

Thanksgiving live blog at the McNamara house with @colinmcnamara and @netbbq

Cloupia is a company built around making converged data center infrastructure easy to build and manage. This take They accomplish this goal by delivery three major product sets -

Unified Infrastructure Management – Cloupia’s Bread and Butter

Cloupia’s Unified Infrastructure controller really the meat of Cloupia’s product line. It puts an single pane of glass interface that provides element and virtual machine management on FlexPod, VSPEX and Vblock converged infrastructure solutions.

• Self Service Portals
• Infrastructure element managment
• Virtual platform management
• Analytics and reporting engines
• Chargeback analysis
• Capacity management

Converged infrastructure management via iPad with Cloud Genie 

Yup, you can control your virtualization and storage infrastructure management via your iPad. If you have seen Cloupia at the NetApp booth at a trade show, there is a 99% chance that this was how they demo’d FlexPod for you. This allows you to provision and manage virtual machines as well as manage certain functions like resizing data stores on your primary storage. 

Cloud Ignite – Build a FlexPod or VSPEX in minutes

Let me share a dirty little secret. Data centers can be complicated places full of blinking spinning things that are connected together in weird and interesting ways. That being said, if you use converged reference architectures like FlexPod or VSPEX you can automate the heck out of it. Some of us use OpenSource tools like Puppet and Razor to decrease to build converged infrastructure. Others use tools like CloudIgnite to capture the different variables necessary to make your Pod “Unique” and the click a button to make infrastructure happen. Cloud Ignite makes that happen.

My question is whether Cisco will keep this reseller / integrator only, which is the current status of CloudIgnite. Or… will the integrate it closely with UCSM to allow the simplicity and scale of configuring a UCS to extend out to converged infrastructure like FlexPod and VSPEX.

What does this mean for CIAC for Cloud and Compute

Honestly, I am a little unclear on this. Currently, a few of the largest Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud and Compute integrations actually use Cloupia as an element manager. There is quite a bit of overlap on functionality, however they are VERY DIFFERENT PRODUCTS under the covers.

One thing that was interesting however, is who has been sending communications about this. The communications about acquiring Cloupia that I got did not come from the Automation and Cloud groups, it came from the leadership at SAVTG (the the makers of UCS, UCSM).

My gut feel is that we will see Cloupia more tightly integrated into UCSM and UCSM manager of Managers, very closely integrated into the UCS Platform. I think I need to have a discussion with Rodrigo Florez over a couple beers and drag it out. Rodrigo, can you ping me on twitter?

Will this work with OpenStack

A good friend of mine is the VP of Technical Operations at Cloupia (now Cisco I guess). I have been bugging him about this for a while, as well as bugging him to get VSPEX support in the product to match the FlexPod offering. I haven’t seen a working implementation from them in front of OpenStack, however I FULLY EXPECT CISCO TO FUND DEVELOPMENT OF MAKING THIS HAPPEN. This would be a brilliant move by Cisco of putting a consumable interface in front of OpenStack for the mid market similar to what Rodrigo is doing on the large scale side with CIAC.

Colin’s thoughts

I like the products that Cloupia makes, as well as the people that make it. Cloupia simplifies the management of both the virtualization layer of your converged infrastructure, but also the hardware elements underneath. This combined with a simple self service portal will provide a pretty awesome solution when integrated on top of UCS and other platforms.

Want to learn more?

Cisco Announces intent to Acquire Cloupia - http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-announces-intent-to-acquire-cloupia/

Cloupia Cloud Automation and Platform Management - http://www.cloupia.com/en/Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Cisco rounds out its portal and automation portfolio by acquiring Cloupia

In this case I am setting up my Cobbler environment to automatically deploy a base operating system and then hand off to Puppet for further configuration. After handoff Puppet will configure the systems in a multi-node OpenStack setup which will rebuild nightly.

The purpose of that entire system this is to do development testing of the Quantum Networking Service for the spring Grizzly release. I will document the process for that in a later blog post.

What we will do today, is get the base system up and running for deploying your server operating systems using Cobbler.

Installing Cobbler

First thing you need to do is install your base operating system. In this case since we are building out a lab environment to test OpenStack builds we should download and install ubuntu server 12.04 (precise).

Once this is up and configured with a static IP address, we need to install and configure cobbler

sudo apt-get install cobbler cobbler-web

This will install Cobbler, and the Cobbler web interface. Next we will run a sanity check of cobbler

sudo cobbler check

You may get some notifications of items that need to be addressed. Address as needed and run the check command to verify.

Next, you can set the username and password that you will use to manage the cobbler web interface. You can replace these items with whatever user / password you would like. In this case we have the username Cobbler and the password cobbler.

htdigest /etc/cobbler/users.digest "Cobbler" cobbler

After you have successfully run cobbler check you will need to synchronize cobbler by running the cobbler-sync command

cobbler sync

Importing Ubuntu Server ISO’s

Next thing we need to do is grab the ISO that we used to install the server we are on, and import it into cobbler. In this case we are making a folder to mount a NFS export called VMwareISO on a NAS at 10.0.76.2

sudo mkdir /mnt/VMwareISO

sudo mount 10.0.76.2:/volume1/VMwareISO /mnt/VMwareISO

Next we have to create an ISO mount point and mount the Ubuntu 12.04 ISO

sudo mkdir /mnt/iso

sudo mount -o loop ubuntu-12.04-server-amd64.iso /mnt/iso

You will get the following message, and that is all right.

mount: warning: /mnt/iso seems to be mounted read-only.

Next, we will import the ISO we just mounted into Cobbler.

sudo cobbler import --name=ubuntu-server --path=/mnt --breed=ubuntu

Configuring DHCP to point to your PXE server

This part will vary based on your lab setup. If you already have a DHCP server setup, then you need to set the “next-server ” option to the ip address of your Cobbler server.

If you want to run DHCP on the same server you are using for Cobbler you need to install and configure a DHCP server.

sudo apt-get instal isc-dhcp-server

Next we have to edit the configuration file /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

sudo vim /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

Now you need to add a statement configuring a DHCP scope on this server. In this case I am using the following options -

• Subnet 10.0.76.0/24
• IP Address range 100-254
• Router 10.0.76.1
• DNS Server 10.0.76.10
• PXE server (cobbler) 10.0.76.30

subnet 10.0.76.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { option routers 10.0.76.1; option domain-name-servers 10.0.76.10; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; range dynamic-bootp 10.0.76.100 10.0.76.254; filename “/pxelinux.0″; default-lease-time 21600; max-lease-time 43200; next-server 10.0.76.30;

Once this is added, restart the DHCP server to pick up your configuration

sudo /etc/init.d/isc-dhcp-server restart

Creating a custom seed file and pointing the Cobbler to it

FYI, this step may not be completely necessary in the future. However there is currently a bug open with Cobbler where when you are using it with a Ubuntu 12.04 file where the client installation will bomb out. You will get an error stating “Bad Archive Mirror An error has been detected while trying to use the specified archive mirror”

If you dig through /var/log/syslog you will find a more descriptive error shown here below

choose-mirror[3474] DEBUG command: wget -q http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu//dists/precise/Release -O – | grep -E ‘^(Suite|Codename):’ choose-mirror[3474] WARNING **: broken mirror: invalid Suite or Codename in Release file for $suite

After a bit of digging I found a bug logged with Cobbler here - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cobbler/+bug/1000219. the bug itself hasn’t been fixed. Luckily however there are a couple ways to work around this.

Copying and Editing your new seed file

Cobbler keeps it’s auto installation files for all different operating system types in /etc/cobbler/ in the next steps we explore this directory and create a new file based on a sample provided.

cd /etc/cobbler

sudo cp ubuntu-server.preseed ubuntu-server.openstack.preseed

Pointing cobbler to the new file

The next  thing we need to do, is log into our Cobbler web interface to and make sure things are working.

your favorite web browser - http://<yourservername>/cobbler_web/ with username Cobbler password cobbler (or whatever username and pass you provided)

Next we need to navigate to PROFILES and click on EDIT to edit ubuntu-server-x86_64 instance

You will see a screen with a bunch of form fields. You need to navigate down to the “Kickstart” option and change from

/var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts/sample.seed

to the file we have just changed sample.seed.precise

/etc/cobbler/ubuntu-server.openstack.preseed

As you can see, all we did was add .precise to the end of the sample.seed file name.

Click save, and now you should be ready to PXE install your first Ubuntu server. (if you use this file your username / pass will be ubuntu/ubuntu)

Whats Next?

In the next blog post in this series we will configure Puppet Master on our server and do a super dangerous thing – optimize our seed files to blow away our file system without any user interaction necessary. Needless to say we will all need to use this next one with caution….

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--Colin McNamara

Setting up Cobbler PXE auto-deployment for Ubuntu Server 12.04 Precise

Don’t get me wrong, out of any server platform I prefer UCS. That being said there are a few area’s that have really caused headaches for me over the years.

Headaches solved with the release of UCSM 2.1

Headache #1 – Once I scale past a certain number of servers, I have to establish a new UCS domain

This has been a huge challenge for both large single data center instances, as well as multi data center instances (such as DR). In both these cases I would have to utilize tricks like placing mac address, wwn pools and other “unique” identifiers into a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) outside of UCS. And even when utilizing external CMDBs, there was a still a bit of design necessary to lay out UCS domains in a fashion that would support eventual integration in the future without overlapping configuration elements.

All of this work was done to ensure that if two servers were instantiated in two different UCS domains that they wouldn’t have conflicts if they wound up on the same segment. Handling this logically by bit swapping the UCS domain ID in certain resource pools wasn’t terribly complicated, but in my opinion unnecessary (though integration with CMDB’s can be very complicated).

This got even more complicated If you wanted to have a DR site. Making something simple happen like having a server that boots from SAN boot of the DR site SAN in an outage involved using external tools or scripts. In my opinion this is something that should be handled by UCSM or a manager of UCSM.

Headache solved – UCS Central Manager of Managers

For those in the now, this has been in the works for a VERY long time. In fact the early install (1000+ servers) that I mentioned above where we had to use external CMDB’s to glue UCS domains together in the first year of UCS generated this feature request. 

UCS Central is in a sense a manager of managers. This allows you to aggregate pools and policies of multiple independent UCS domains into one central management platform.

It solves the problems -

• resource conflicts across pools,
• mobility of service profiles between UCS domains as well as
• centralizing access logs
• centralizing access to console servers

Headache #2 – Even when Cisco released code to manage c-series 19″ rack mounts under UCSM it still required a bunch of extra cables and equipment to make it work.

70% of the worlds x86 servers are in a 19″ rack mount form factor. Recently Cisco enabled them to be managed under UCSM and to have a data path that exits through the fabric interconnects. This allowed a couple key things to happen. First, it allowed a unified view of systems for an administrative staff for a data center. Second, it allowed a clean data path from, say a storage caching engine run on a a b-250 blade, to a compute node housed on a c240 rack mount. All of this communication would be contained within the fabric interconnects, and not have to exit northbound as it had in the past.

I was happy with this release. It allowed the c-series servers to be managed under UCSM with the same tools techniques and API’s that we manage the blades with. However the code was not updated to allow all that magic to happen over a single wire.

You would end up with beautiful cabling on the backs of your blade centers, and a giant mess of cables coming out of your rack mounts since you needed separate cables to support data path vs management plane. Call me a neatnick, but I like my racks to be pretty and clean (and not have to buy extra switches, cables and adapters).

Headache solved – Single wire management for ALL UCS servers

With the 2.1 release now all you need is a single Cisco Virtual Interface Card in your UCS 19″ rack mount (two if you want redundancy) to allow the full feature set that you have available on a UCS blade. For me this not only simplify’s my designs, but also allows flexibility in things like designing Hadoop and OpenStack Swift Object Storage clusters where redundancy is done at the application level and dual 10 gig interfaces are not needed.

Headache #3 – For certain topologies I want storage locally attached to my pods using whatever protocol I want

Here is a dirty little secret. Even though you can abstract a bunch of storage functions into UCS, most server guys are still a bit impatient with their peers on the storage teams. There are many times when the server guys want to consolidate a bunch of boot disks into an array and connect them directly to the fabric interconnects.

Over time Cisco has been releasing support for additional protocols connected in this way, however it was not ubiquitous. This created problems because you could not create a standard topology that supported flexible protocol consumption in your network. You would end up with two to three variants of supported topologies. In my opinion this creates issues with operational procedures and leads to extension of outages and generally inefficient designs.

Headache solved – Flexible and consistent storage topology options no matter what protocol is being used.

With UCS 2.1 now, no matter what protocol floats your boat you can implement them in a consistent manner. This may include directly connecting Fibre Channel storage to your fabric interconnects and zoning them. Or it may include utilizing multi-hop FCoE (I’ll leave the argument to whether you SHOULD use this till later).

Either way, the most important thing to me is that no matter what the design requirements are. Now you have the tools available to meet them in a consistent fashion without changing your entire network and systems topology.

Colin’s Thoughts

Quite often there is lots of glitz and glamor when a new product is released. Press conferences are held where everybody looks at the shiny blinky things and oohs and aweess. However when new software makes things you already use every day work better, or allows them to do new things comes out nobody notices.

In this case the 2.1 release of UCSM takes a product that many people already have (Unified Computing System) and makes it do more. There aren’t going to be press conferences about this, but it is worth taking a closer look at. It will make my life easier, and I hope it does the same for you.

 Similar Posts:

• Cisco introduces the C-Series Rack Servers
• Fixing UCS Config Failures due to local disk config requirements
• Simplifying remote site security with Cisco’s new video surveillance modules on the ISR
• Usability features in Cisco’s Nexus 7000
• Interesting TechWise TV episode on virtualization
• Evacuation status update

--Colin McNamara

Simplifying scale out DataCenter design with UCS Manager 2.1

Which one of these is the candy apple onion?

 *********UPDATED *********

It WORKED! Matt Jenson took a bite of a slice of Candy Covered Onion. Thankfully he was a great sport about it.

Happy halloween everybody. And remember, it is TRICK or TREAT. You don’t always get a treat….

Similar Posts:

• None Found

--Colin McNamara

Candy Apple Onions in the Nexus Breakroom – Yes, I am evil

We are in Day4 of the OpenStack Design and User summit for Fall 2012. Earlier in this week I have been bouncing between design sessions (figuring out what blueprints we want to work on next), speaking at my session, and learning in the users session.

9:00am

11:00am

1:30pm

3:20pm

4:10pm

5:00pm

8:00pm

Similar Posts:

• OpenStack Summit Fall 2012 Day 2 – Where is colin
• My Schedule – OpenStack summit day 3
• Speaking at IPMA tomorrow on OpenStack, DevOps and Continuous Delivery
• OpenStack presentations to vote for – Shameless pandering
• My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack
• Come to my session on surviving your first commit at OpenStack summit

--Colin McNamara

OpenStack summit Schedule – Thursday – Focusing on Swift Object Storage

7:45am

9:00am

9:30am

10:00am

11:00am

11:50am

1:50pm

2:40pm

3:40pm

4:30pm

5:20pm

6:00pm

8:00pm

Similar Posts:

• OpenStack Summit Fall 2012 Day 2 – Where is colin
• VMware approved as a Gold member of OpenStack Foundation
• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead
• OpenStack summit Schedule – Thursday – Focusing on Swift Object Storage
• Cisco announces it’s own OpenStack Distribution – What will the effect be on VMware?
• OpenStack Summit Day 1 – Where is Colin?

--Colin McNamara

My Schedule – OpenStack summit day 3

9:00am

9:30am

10:00am

11:00am

11:50am

1:50pm

######### Most Importan Session of the Day ################

2:40pm

3:40pm

5:20pm

6:00pm

8:00pm

Similar Posts:

• Come to my session on surviving your first commit at OpenStack summit
• My Schedule – OpenStack summit day 3
• OpenStack presentations to vote for – Shameless pandering
• OpenStack summit Schedule – Thursday – Focusing on Swift Object Storage
• Cisco announces it’s own OpenStack Distribution – What will the effect be on VMware?
• My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack

--Colin McNamara

OpenStack Summit Fall 2012 Day 2 – Where is colin

9:00am

9:50am

11:00am

11:50am

1:15pm

2:40pm

3:40pm

4:30pm

6:00pm

Similar Posts:

• My Schedule – OpenStack summit day 3
• OpenStack Summit Fall 2012 Day 2 – Where is colin
• OpenStack summit Schedule – Thursday – Focusing on Swift Object Storage
• VMware approved as a Gold member of OpenStack Foundation
• OpenStack presentations to vote for – Shameless pandering
• Cisco announces it’s own OpenStack Distribution – What will the effect be on VMware?

--Colin McNamara

OpenStack Summit Day 1 – Where is Colin?

Over the past year OpenStack has transformed  from an interesting Open Source project used by some large web service providers, to the emerging standard for on premise OpenSource cloud platform.

There are many reasons for this rapid transformation from interesting project to cloud standard. In my belief the primary reason is that the major networking and systems hardware manufacturers have figured out that by supporting the development of OpenStack that now have a way to fight back against Amazon and EC2.

Why is Cisco releasing their own Distribution of OpenStack

A couple weeks ago Paul Perez (CTO of Cisco’s Server and Virtualization Business Unit) was speaking to Cisco’s top Data Center partners and revealed that Cisco has saved 40% on licensing costs in their development environments by utilizing OpenStack.

Cisco has realized dramatic cost savings already by utilizing OpenStack in places where they would have had to use VMware in the past. These places are extraordinarily large, and quite complex.

What does this mean for the VMware relationship?

“Will we compete against VMware as it relates to networking? Absolutely,” Chambers told CRN. “And when we compete, we don’t lose.”  - John Chambers, CEO Cisco Systems

John Chambers made some strong statements in an interview with CRN last week about how Cisco will compete with VMware. It is not secret that tensions have been high ever since the Nicira acquisition, and they probably won’t relax in the short term.

The reality is however that Cisco and VMware still have much to gain in remaining strong partners. Taking Paul Perez’s statements as an example – while they saved 40% of licensing costs in development, 60% of those dollars were still spent on something like VMware.

The future of our customers data centers will most likely have multiple hypervisor stacks. Some of these stacks will highlight commercial platforms like VMware, Citrix and Hyper-V. While most likely development, Q&A and “Cloud” environments will feature OpenStack.

It makes complete sense for Cisco to maintain positive relationships with all of these software vendors since they are very likely to install right on top of Cisco’s UCS platform. And last time I checked, everyone at Cisco is quite happy every time a UCS ships out the door.

Who should you watch –  Lew Tucker – VP and CTO of Cloud Computing for Cisco

As the CTO of SAVG, Paul Perez may be the one who talks a lot about OpenStack as it relates to Cisco in the classic press and events. However the man behind the curtain that everyone should be paying attention to is Lew Tucker.

Lew, a former CTO at Sun Microsystems has quietly assembled a powerhouse team at Cisco that has been writing functional code that allows OpenStack to closely leverage key Cisco networking technologies.

Not only has Lew and the team been writing great code, but they have also been taking both public and private leadership roles in the OpenStack foundation.

Case in point, one of the developers on Lew’s team was the one who pushed through my OpenStack Individual Contribution License, allowing me to submit my first piece of code (Storage QOS enhancement) to OpenStack.

What should you do next?

Frankly, you should do what I have been doing for the better part of a year. You need to focus on becoming knowledgeable about OpenStack. The most dangerous thing I have seen over this past year of escalating excitement is people talking, influencing, and making decisions without the proper knowledge.

I recommend getting it running in your internal lab environments and possibly finding a small corner or production to run it in (only if that corner is appropriate). Figure out how to deploy it, manage it and extend it. There more you poke around, the better prepared you will be.

Want to learn more?

Come to My Session at OpenStack Summit – An Engineers Guide to Contributing to OpenStack

Cisco Edition of OpenStack 

Cisco Quantum Plugin for Folsom

Cisco OpenStack reference architecture on UCS C2XX Similar Posts:

• Cisco Open Networking Environment – onePK OpenFlow and OpenStack
• OpenStack presentations to vote for – Shameless pandering
• Where is Colin ? Passing the VCP exam (VMware Certified Professional)
• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead
• VMworld 2009 Schedule
• Come to my session on surviving your first commit at OpenStack summit

--Colin McNamara

Cisco announces it’s own OpenStack Distribution – What will the effect be on VMware?

Presentation Schedule

You can participate too – All these presentation are available to you live in HD

If you are interested an any of these session,s you can follow along too by checking out the livestream found here – http://livestre.am/49BHg

A bit about Networking Field Day –

Gestalt IT’s fourth datacenter networking-focused Field Day event will be held on October 10 through 12 in Silicon Valley! This unique event brings together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders, allowing them to get to know one another. It is a forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback. This is Gestalt IT’s third year of Tech Field Day events – learn more at the Tech Field Day site!

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• None Found

--Colin McNamara

Come join me at Networking Field Day 4

I’ll be speaking next week at the Spring 2012 OpenStack summit. If you are going to attend, feel free to attend my session (details are below).

Session Details -

Tuesday, October 16 – 2:40pm

Surviving your first check-in: An engineers guide to contributing to OpenStack

Let me tell you a dirty little secret. While OpenStack is a great project, it is extremely complicated for and indivdual with an engineering/operations focus vs a programming focus to get to their first code contribution.

My name is Colin, I am and engineer. Although I initially got involved with OpenStack in the context of operations, I quickly was drawn into actually contributing code to the project. What I found is that many of the tools and workflows used to contribute to OpenStack are completely foreign to those (like me) with an operations focus.

In this session I will go over the biggest challenges that I faced as an engineer contributing. And review the  tools and techniques to that I used to get past them. This information will be presented with the goal of arming engineers just getting involved with the knowledge tools necessary to get to their first successful contribution and beyond.

Learning objectives

1. The importance of community – Leveraging the power of the meeting

2. Talking your employeer into supporting OpenStack and the CLA

3. Setting up your dev environments – getting beyond Devstack

4. Getting git, using the git repository for those that don’t code for a living

5. Testing your code – what do you mean it doesn’t build?

6. How to give back, and get other people involved in the community.Similar Posts:

• OpenStack presentations to vote for – Shameless pandering
• OpenStack Summit Fall 2012 Day 2 – Where is colin
• Cisco announces it’s own OpenStack Distribution – What will the effect be on VMware?
• What is my value to the OpenStack community, and why you should vote for me in this weeks elections – UPDATED
• OpenStack summit Schedule – Thursday – Focusing on Swift Object Storage
• Speaking at IPMA tomorrow on OpenStack, DevOps and Continuous Delivery

--Colin McNamara

Come to my session on surviving your first commit at OpenStack summit

There has been a lot of discussion in the past couple years regarding networking manufacturers using market silicon vs developing ASICs in house. While there are valid arguments on both sides of the table, Cisco just made a strong argument for the creation on custom ASICs and controlling their own destiny.

Nexus 3548 – 190 nanosecond latency in a 48 port 10 gig switch

This argument comes to life with the Cisco Nexus 3548 low latency data center switch. Coming in a 1RU form factor and with 48 10 gig SFP+ ports it resembles  the nexus 5500 line, however the guts are packed with some shiny new bits that make trades execute faster then the competition and HPC clusters sing.

Performance Numbers – RFC2544 testing

The punchline of Cisco’s statement is a 48 port switch that operates (in a non optimized mode) at 250 nanoseconds across all frame sizes. That is 653 nanoseconds faster then the closest 48 port low latency switch on the market, and 333 nanoseconds faster than the 24 port option. This is roughly 60% faster than the closest current competition in the market. All of these numbers are for the switch operating in normal (full function) mode. There is a second mode called “Warp” mode that focus’s the resources of the switch towards lowering latency down to 190 nanoseconds.

Technology powering the Nexus 3548 – Algo Boost

The key technology behind the ASICs in the 3548 is Algo Boost. Algo Boost adds another dimension to HPC network design, which historically has been defined by latency and bandwidth. This new dimension, which can be critical to HPC system performance is buffer management. Not only does the Nexus 3548 have very large (18MB) buffers, but it also has intelligent buffer management features that allow for monitoring and reporting of utilization and more importantly buffer congestion across the switch, increasing application performance.

Summit it up

Cisco is making many bets in the ASIC development space. The most recent bet with the Nexus 3548 allows Cisco to present an option to the market that is 60% faster then any of the current competition, and is likely to retain a speed advantage even against the upcoming Alta chipset from Intel. This combined with the proven performance of NX-OS should result in Cisco regaining a leadership position in the HPC and Algorithmic trading market.Similar Posts:

• Arista Networks – Their approach to cloud networking
• Cisco Nexus 5010 released
• Simplifying your Data Center with Cisco’s Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender (FEX)
• Cisco releases Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware
• Identity aware networking using Cisco TrustSec
• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel

--Colin McNamara

Breaking the 200 nanosecond barrier with Algo Boost on the Nexus 3548

One of the side discussions that came about was how the OpenStack board had put the application by VMware to become a gold member on hold. Many people quickly brought up thoughts of politics and scheming. Though from what I hear the main reason was because everyone is busy writing up by-laws and getting ready for the Folsom release.

Now it is time to put the drama to rest. VMware, as well as Intel and NEC were all approved as gold members on Friday by the board.

• OpenStack Summit Day 1 – Where is Colin?
• Cisco announces it’s own OpenStack Distribution – What will the effect be on VMware?
• What is my value to the OpenStack community, and why you should vote for me in this weeks elections – UPDATED
• My Schedule – OpenStack summit day 3
• Where is Colin ? Passing the VCP exam (VMware Certified Professional)
• Cisco Open Networking Environment – onePK OpenFlow and OpenStack

--Colin McNamara

VMware approved as a Gold member of OpenStack Foundation

I have been saying that we will start seeing Open Source virtualization technologies in two different areas of the market (signs the world is changing). These are web service providers and the small to medium business (SMB)

The web service providers have already long ago chosen open source hypervisors for their platforms (Amazon = Xen, Many others KVM, etc etc). Where Open Source Virtualization hasn’t shown up yet is  small business (250 users and below).

I should say, this hadn’t show up until recently….

Scale computing started as a storage company with scale out unified storage. They have been shipping a consumer friendly implementation of GPFS (a horizontally scalable files system that is notoriously hard to configure) since 2009. They have been nipping at the heals of Dell and HP’s low end product lines, coming in with a competitive product at a fraction of the price.

They are  lowering the technical barrier to entry of open source virtualization platforms by putting a pretty and accessible wrapper around open source virtualization software and scale out storage software with its new Hyper-Converged virtualization platform – HC3 (hypercube for the nerds out there) product.

What is a hyper-converged platform

Quite simply a hyper-converged platform is a server with storage, virtualization and networking software all rolled up into one. Think of a FlexPod or VSPEX all squished into one box.

Open Source Virtualization used in Scale HC3

Guess what, you can run a virtual machine on many technologies including, but not limited to VMware. One of these technologies which is widely used is Kernel-based Virtual Machine. Here is the kicker, it is Open Source. That means that it is free. It is Open Source, which generally means it is hard to configure for the common admin. That is where the next piece comes in.

An actual usable portal in front of Open Source virtualization

This is the missing piece in most Open Source or free implementations of server or virtualization. KVM is awesome, GPFS works well. Both are extremely hard for your average desktop / phone / network / single IT guy for all things that exist in small companies to implement.

The portal in HC3 puts a nice GUI wrapper on this technology and makes it consumable in a click click next fashion. Is it vSphere? Absolutely not. What it is, is a way to handle simple things running a windows VM, or taking a backup, or replicating your data somewhere else.

Why am I talking about Scale?

Full disclosure, I met their CEO and CTO at an industry experts discussion a while back. The context of the discussion was wide ranging, but generally focused on the evolving cloud computing and virtualization markets. Even though they run a software/hardware company, and I manage a line of business at a systems integrator, many of our views lined up.

One of the views that we share is that small business will start consuming hyper-converged (server, storage, network all on one server) virtualization solutions based off of open source or free technology. The key worlds to pay attention to here are using open source or free technology.

Fast forward to the week of VMworld. I was invited by Stephen Foskett to participate in the #techfieldday round table at VMworld.  Low and behold, there are the guys from Scale ready and armed to have a nuts and bolts technical discussion of their product internals and go to market. Needless to see I was able to get my nerd on.

The reason I think Scale is worth talking about is because they already penetrate the low end of the commercial market (SMB) with their scale out storage product. And now are shipping  a product that takes free or open source technology and packages it in a way that the common man can implement a small infrastructure on it. Not only do I think the direction they are taking their company is right, but they are shipping products to make it happen.

Who should be worried about Scale?

Dell has made a business out of making low cost servers. In the past few years companies like SuperMicro and SGI(Rackables) have taken that tittle as their own. Dell has evolved by acquiring low cost storage and networking solutions and selling them into the SMB market.

I think that the fact that Dell acquired (and not developed) its low cost storage offerings will paint it into a corner as Scale and other companies like it compete in the field with a solution that is equivalent in function, but a fraction of the cost. Eventually as these as these hyper-converged solutions gain acceptance other manufacturers like Cisco and HP may start to see a bit of competition, but are likely to

Want to learn more?

Stephen Foskett’s View on Scale HC3 

Tech Field Day round table on Scale

IBM GPFS – Scalable File System in Scale HC3 

Kernel-based Virtual Machine – KVM, The open source hypervisor used in HC3

Scale Computing HC3Similar Posts:

• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead
• My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack
• Cisco Open Networking Environment – onePK OpenFlow and OpenStack
• My Schedule – OpenStack summit day 3
• Cisco is using Linux virtualization and 40 core CPU’s for its next generation routers
• Cisco announces it’s own OpenStack Distribution – What will the effect be on VMware?

--Colin McNamara

Scale Computing HC3 – Hyper-Converged Server, Storage, Virtualization

My nights and weekends however have been spent doing something completely different. It started with casual reading and exploration. Brand new VM’s running odd little hypervisors started sprouting up in my labs. Next thing you know I was spending late nights at strange peoples offices hacking away at something that I think represents a major shift in our industry.

My name is Colin, and I am working on OpenStack

Shift happens…

The major shift I am talking about has been called many things, including “cloud computing”. This is possibly the single most ill defined and overused term of all time.  What I am talking about is CIO’s voting with their wallets. They are voting to move significant workloads to low cost fractionally consumed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings that most people call “Cloud”.

Not all “Cloud / IaaS” offerings are the same, but many of them share the following features. They generally utilize open source hypervisors such as Xen or KVM. Many of them utilize Open Source VM and object and storage platforms such as Gluster and Swift. Almost all public clouds are extensive users of systems automation (DevOPS), and expose SOAP or RESTful API’s (most commonly Amazon’s EC2 API). The use of all these items significantly lower the capital and operational expense for operating a cloud environment.

Why are most Public Cloud (IaaS) cheaper then on Premise Clouds (IaaS) ?

The one trend that these public IaaS offering share when compared to the IaaS platforms you see commonly deployed on a customer premise today. The most significant trend is that almost exclusively you will find Open Source (free) software used instead of commercial software and hardware packages. In an enterprise customer it is not uncommon to find up to 50% of the cost of a server spent on virtualization software licensing.

Not only do current on premise IaaS solutions carry a high cost for virtualization software, but it is normal for 300% (3x) the price of servers to spent on shared storage. This is normally done to accomplish the goals of Live Migration (or vMotion) as well as supporting a high number of IOPS.

These costs are unnecessarily high, but the Open Source tools necessary to lower them are not accessible by most customers

This is why I am working on OpenStack. The goal of OpenStack is to provide a high quality, Open Source cloud operating system to the world. This will lower the barrier of entry for using these open source technologies, allowing customers to create private clouds that are price competitive with the “Amazons” of the world. I not only believe in that goal, I am both actively organizing teams and contributing code to make this a reality.

Herb Kelleher, Co-Founder Southwest Airlines (one of my favorite companies) made a difference in this world by executing a vision of “Democratizing the skies”. The people contributing to OpenStack are executing on a similar vision – “Democratizing access to the Cloud”.  I have been doing this privately up till now, but consider this my public statement.

My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack

 Similar Posts:

• My Schedule – OpenStack summit day 3
• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead
• OpenStack Summit Fall 2012 Day 2 – Where is colin
• Cisco announces it’s own OpenStack Distribution – What will the effect be on VMware?
• Cisco Open Networking Environment – onePK OpenFlow and OpenStack
• EMC and VMware launching the Pivotal Initiative – The larger Picture

--Colin McNamara

My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack

Yes, the hypervisor is commodity now. Whether it is ESXi, Hyper-V, Xen or KVM. You can take multiple operating systems and virtualize them on one CPU, share memory as well as do a live migration between hosts on all platforms.

Not only have commonly used features listed above become available across many platforms, but in some cases open source technologies such as KVM be more extensible then VMware’s product.

What is VMware thinking?

For the past couple years, VMware has been investing in technologies outside of the hypervisor. Some of this include Cloud Automation, Virtual Desktop, Application security and control, and Operations and Management.

These investments are smart, because it transforms the conversation from a discussion about hypervisors (which is a hard one to win on its own merits) to a discussion about the value add of all of the products that VMware offers.

Bundling of products and services is business 101 when your product becomes commoditized. Cisco does it by integrating all aspects of their product lines, EMC does it by offering a range of integrated Tier 1-4 storage and backup solutions, and VMware does it by offering significantly more then a hypervisor.

I believe that this is the first step in VMware integrating their services into NON-ESXi hypervisors. Here is why - 

A few key concepts have emerged to be true in the virtualization market

1. Integrating multiple hypervisor support into their management platform (Systems Center Operations Manager – SCOM) is something customers want.

2. Customers are willing to utilize “Free” hypervisors such as Hyper-V or KVM / Xen for at minimum second or third their applications. And in some cases such as cloud service providers they are using these (specifically KVM and Xen) for their tier one virtualization.

3. The Cloud Service provider market is booming. It is not possible to compete on cost in that market while running on anything but Open Source hypervisors.

What the acquisition of Nicira gives Nicira is an integration point between all of the rich applications that have been developed since ESXi and Hyper-V, Xen and KVM (OpenStack).

Nicira already has plugins and to each of those platforms, providing not only a richly developed code base, but a conduit for linking disparate clouds together.

Does this signal an end to the honeymoon between VMware and Cisco?

The partnership between VMware and Cisco has been one based on mutual benefit, not mutual exclusivity.

The fact of the matter is that Cisco has been working with multiple Hypervisor’s for a long time now. ESXi, Hyper-V, Xen and KVM are all supported platforms on their Unified Computing Platform (UCS). Just the same as VMware was working with HP and Dell long before Cisco started making servers.

If you look close, you will notice that Cisco has been a major player in the OpenStack project. So much that there is EXTREMELY RICH integration with OpenStack’s Quantum Networking service in both UCS and the Nexus switching platform.

What this shows is that Cisco is presenting itself as a network and systems platform for Virtualization software manufacturers to leverage. Nicira has networking functions, but then so does the distributed vSwitch. At the end of the day, logical switching still needs physical devices. This is still a place where Cisco can and will play – As an arms dealer to software manufacturers

Summing it all up

The hypervisor is dead, for VMware to stay relevant it has to continue innovating higher up the stack. The acquisition of Nicira will allow VMware to have a play in the service provider market and do just that.

It also provides an avenue for VMware to port it’s higher level applications to run on multiple hypervisors. This has the potential to slow flow of customers to free platforms like Hyper-V and OpenStack.

While this isn’t the best thing for the Cisco relationship, the reality of the matter is that VMware and Cisco have an “Open” relationship where both companies work with many others. I don’t see this relationship changing in the long run.

 Similar Posts:

• Scale Computing HC3 – Hyper-Converged Server, Storage, Virtualization
• Cisco announces it’s own OpenStack Distribution – What will the effect be on VMware?
• VMware approved as a Gold member of OpenStack Foundation
• My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack
• My Schedule – OpenStack summit day 3
• Cisco’s Cloud Computing Offering

--Colin McNamara

VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead

The funny thing is that these applications would have gone down whether they were hosted with Amazon, or delivered from a private infrastructure. The reason they went down is because key infrastructure needed to deliver these apps was all running in one place. Amazon would call this place an “availability zone”, in a private cloud you would call this a data center.

The key flaw here is not that these companies are utilizing a cloud provider. It is that where and how these applications are delivered is abstracted from development teams. In a private cloud offering, operations teams and sysadmins normally take into account segmentation of fault domains and do their best to ensure that a single outage will not take down a business critical application.

Now days, more and more application teams are requesting resources through an API. The same checks and balances that existed in the past, where a third party thought about how the system survives in an outage do not always exist. The result of this is systems that can easily scale programmatically to millions of uses in minutes, but cannot survive a simple power outage in one of many data centers in which the applications reside.

What is the lesson here? The lesson is not to avoid deploying apps in public clouds. The lesson is that the same application architecture flaws that caused Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram to go down are becoming prevalent in privately managed infrastructure (private clouds) also.

It is very easy to allow your development teams interaction with the IT infrastructure provider to completely devolve to interaction with an API as instances are created. What is needed is to training and education of development teams on aspects of high availability application design and/or integration of systems architects into these teams to ensure the applications will survive simple infrastructure outages like the ones that hit Amazon yesterday.Similar Posts:

• Cisco’s Cloud Computing Offering
• My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack
• About Colin McNamara
• Is your network ready for Cloud Computing with Virtual Infrastructure 4?
• Vote for my VMworld presentation – #3221 Built to fail (shameless pandering)
• Cisco rounds out its portal and automation portfolio by acquiring Cloupia

--Colin McNamara

Netflix Pinterest Instagram outage is not Amazon’s fault

In all seriousness it was a blast to spend time chatting with these guys, and it highlights the value that VSPEX brings to our customers. Just like on the couch VSPEX only can only be delivered when Cisco, EMC and their mutual channel partners, in this case Nexus jointly deliver a flexible, reference architecture based solution.

Want to learn more?

Post from Patrick Teel – @pteel

http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/cisco-and-emc-vspex-accelerating-the-journey-to-the-cloud/

EMC’s Flexible Architecture Explained

http://www.colinmcnamara.com/vspex-emcs-flexible-reference-architecture-explained/

 Similar Posts:

• VSPEX – EMC’s Flexible Reference Architecture Explained
• VSPEX – EMC’s Flexible Reference Architecture Explained
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• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel
• Cisco Nexus 4000 Blade Switch

--Colin McNamara

Three incredibly handsome men from Cisco, Nexus and EMC talk about VSPEX

So what is this Open Networking Environment? Is is just another marketecture slideware play, or is the more meat to it? Lucky for us there is actually some meat to this release. So much so that two of the three area’s you can actually see working deep down in the Cisco booths at the world of solutions.

Cisco OnePK – Standardizing the programmatic interfaces across Cisco’s networking products

The first, onePK is something that I am personally very happy to see (Rick Davis and I proposed this to Cisco’s Routing Group during the Partner Technology Advisory Board in 2008). OnePK is a unified SDK (Software Development Kit) across IO, IOS-XR and NX-OS. What this will allow is simplification of deployment of configurations, changes, and operations and maintenance flows across a diverse suite of network products.

Personally, this is is a close tie for the 1000v on OpenStack as my favorite part of this release. Over the past few years I have built the some of the largest Data Centers on earth. Automating the deployments for these installations requires entirely to much Expect scripting, and still leaves a lot of custom coding to push and pull changes and statistics out of running equipment. OnePK should drastically simplify this process, and allow me personally to consolidate a large amount of deployment code into one simplified interface standard.

Cisco’s OpenFlow Controller and OpenFlow Agent

It is official, Cisco is creating an OpenFlow controller. What is even more interesting, is that I heard a rumor that if you ask nicely and go deep into the Cisco booth at the world of solutions you may actually get a sneak peak at one in action.

Cisco Virtual Overlay Solutions – 1000v on everything

This gets really interesting. One thing many people may have not noticed is that Cisco has been contributing code like crazy to the Quantum Networking Stack for OpenStack. Anytime I see a manufacturing committing that amount of code, you know something is up.

Well, now it is public, official, and we can all talk about it. Cisco is taking the Nexus 1000v and making it WAAAAY more useful. They are developing hooks for XEN, KVM, Hyper-V as well as continuing VMware support. That isn’t the cool part though. What they are doing is utilizing the network hypervisor to control and redirect flows across a many provider environments.

In the end what this will allow is the extension and linkage of cloud environments across disparate network and virtualization vendors. In short, linking your clouds through software only.

My thoughts

This release is a big milestone for Cisco. The Open Networking “movement” is significant to Cisco  in a similar way that Linux was significant to Sun. Sun went out of business (acquired by Oracle) because they didn’t embrace “Open” movements and layer on their unique value add. I believe what Cisco announced today is a very smart move, and will allow Cisco to stay meaningful as Networking, Systems and Clouds take a more Open Source / Stack / Flow flavor.

Want to learn more?

OpenStack Quantum

http://wiki.openstack.org/Quantum

Omar Sultan (Cisco) should be posting interesting content on the Cisco DC Blog

http://blogs.cisco.com/category/datacenter

Nice write up at CRN

http://www.crn.com/news/networking/240001990/cisco-live-new-developer-tools-details-on-sdn-strategy-emerge.htm

 Similar Posts:

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• Cisco Certified Design Expert – CCDE – officially released by Cisco
• OpenStack Summit Day 1 – Where is Colin?

--Colin McNamara

Cisco Open Networking Environment – onePK OpenFlow and OpenStack

We are getting together for an easy 5k (3.1 mile) run on the San Diego Water Front. We would love for you to join us at 8:00 am on the morning of July 12th at Cisco Live in San Diego.

Details – We will be meeting on the waterfront side of the Marriot at 8:00 am on Tuesday morning 6/12/2012. Full event details are available here -  on the Cisco Live Charity Fun Run Facebook Page

If you don’t want to run, but want to donate (even $1 makes a difference) The Wounded Warriors Donation Link is on the Run’s Facebook Page

###### UPDATE ######

I wanted to throw up some incentives to encourage those people who may not be attending Cisco live to participate in supporting wounded warriors.

First a bit of background on The Wounded Warriors Project

Mission – To foster the most successful, well-adjusted generation of wounded service members in our nation’s history.

I’ve thrown up an 8GB iPod Touch as the first prize for spreading the word and supporting the Wounded Warriors Charity.

ENTRY IS SIMPLE :

Like the Cisco Live US charity Fun Run Facebook page and leave a comment on this post so I can track and know who you are.

Once you have liked and commented so we can track who is who you can gain additional entries by donating here.

Each dollar donation is equal to an additional entry.

There will be a random drawing at 5 PM on June 14th 2012. More points increase your chances of winning! GOOD LUCK!Similar Posts:

• I woke up shaved bald and with one eyebrow…
• Link Round Up – L2TPv3 FCOE Trill Wounded Warriors
• Colin has left ePlus Technology
• Come to my session on surviving your first commit at OpenStack summit
• Updated CCIE numbers
• VSPEX – EMC’s Flexible Reference Architecture Explained

--Colin McNamara

Cisco Live Charity Fun Run – Benefiting Wounded Warriors + Product Give Aways!

A former Marines Perspective

When someone thanks me for my service it is appreciated, but unnecessary. Out of an 8 year contract, I spent 2 years 8 months on active duty. This including being activated after 9/11 and the last time we decided to go play in the Iraqi sandbox. It was a horribly hard for me and my family, I will carry scars and shrapnel with me for the rest of my life. However I had sworn an oath to serve. And that is what I did.

Now however life is much different. While I carry forward many USMC traits, the hardships that I faced back then are far and distant memories. When someone “thanks me for my service” I appreciate the gesture, however it misses the mark by many years.

When I really needed someone to thank me for my service

When I got back from my initial training in the mid 90′s and was so hungry I would flirt with the girls at Taco Bell to get free food, and couldn’t even pay my rent. I needed thanks and support then.

When I told the owner of the Reseller  I worked at after 9/11 that it was likely I would be activated, and he laid me off for my honestly. (Yes I know that is illegal, however suing your employer never works out well). Sadly this situation happened to many of my friends in the reserves. We all went from six figure jobs in Silicon Valley to nothing.

When the landlords of my apartment tried to evict my wife from her one bedroom apartment while I was deployed. I needed the thanks and support.

When Bush hung a banner saying mission accomplished, and six months later I got to come home. To no job, mounting bills, a wife and small child looking to me to figure out what to do. I could have really used the thanks and support then.

A few people giving thanks and support when it was needed made a HUGE difference.

When got back from my first activation in 97′ I was starving, about to be homeless and down to my last straw. I was walking to Taco Bell (Where I used to flirt with the girls to get free food) to put in an application so i wouldn’t get evicted from my apartment. As I was walking up to the store a car pulled up in the drive through, and recognized me. We had worked together in High School, he was in the Army National Gard and I had joined the Marines. I told him about my situation and it turns out he managed the systems build team at a local Value Added Reseller. Two days later I had a job on the midnight shift building PC’s. Him thanking me for my service resulted in me not living on the streets. More so without that CHANCE to prove myself I would not be in the technology field today.

The second person who gave thanks and support when it was drastically needed is Ed Chen. I had done a bit of consulting with his group at Openwave Systems over the years before my activation for Iraq. When the owner of the VAR I was working for laid me off just prior to activation Ed was a great friend and kept his ear open for an permanent opening at Openwave the year I got back to the real world. Ed kept me in his thoughts for the year I was gone. Once I was back and adjusted to the real world he had teed up an opening with his boss for me running the VOIP systems worldwide. His thanks and support made a huge difference in me and my families life.

What you should do to show thanks

As we wind down our military from the wars of the past decade here are a large number of Veterans re-integrating themselves into civilian life. For a hardened military veteran this is possible one of the hardest transitions to make successfully. When you see that Vet living on the street, that is a person who didn’t make it.

The single most valuable thing you can do to say thanks to a Veteran is to give one a chance.  We all have openings in our mail rooms, pulling cables, racking servers and switches. These low level jobs are a perfect entry point for these new Veterans integrating back into the real world. Given the chance many of them will work extra hard to learn and grow, and pay you back ten-fold on your investment. Someone gave thanks and gave me a chance. I encourage you to do the same and thank that Veteran that you don’t know.

 Similar Posts:

• Cisco Live Charity Fun Run – Benefiting Wounded Warriors + Product Give Aways!
• I woke up shaved bald and with one eyebrow…

--Colin McNamara

DON’T Thank the veteran you know today

What is VSPEX? There has been a bit of speculation floating around the industry the past couple of weeks regarding what EMC will be releasing. I have heard rumors spreading from the extreme of EMC create a new super version of VPLEX, to EMC creating a product wholly and completely competitive with Vblock (mentioned here by CRN last week talking about a VMAX based VPLEX). A few people, notable the folks at the register (VSPEX article here) have come quite a bit closer to the truth by calling out that a new reference architecture positioned to address the mid-market in a similar fashion to NetApp’s FlexPod offering.

The truth about VSPEX

VSPEX is a pre-validated set of reference architectures currently focused around Server Virtualization (cloud computing if you want to church it up) as well as end-user computing (VDI/VXI/Application Presentation Solutions). It fills the gap in EMC’s solution offerings that exists between a design and build your own solutions and their converged infrastructure product (VCE Vblock).

What components create VSPEX

Networking – VSPEX will be featureing Cisco’s Nexus 5548 Unified Port Switch as the networking component. This is the standard 10 gig switch used in Cisco’s other Validated Designs and is the standard platform for an aggregation layer for most Cisco based Data Centers.

Compute – Cisco Unified Computing System will be featured as the compute platform for VSPEX. For the mid market solutions that feature VNX storage Cisco B-Series blade centers will be recommend. For SMB focused solutions featuring VNXe storage Cisco’s C-Series servers will be featured.

Unified Storage – EMC VNX 5500/5300 Unified storage, supporting Fibre Channel, NFS and iSCSI will be offered for Mid Market solutions and VNXe supporting only IP protocols will be specified for SMB solutions.

Server Virtualization – Both VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V based validated and tested designs will be released. This is very interesting as both NetApp and EMC now have included Hyper-V as a supported scalable hypervisor. I personally have been a huge fan of VMware over the years, however I think that signs like this show that Hyper-V is increasingly penetrating both EMC and NetApp’s customer base.

End-User Compute (VDI) – Two solutions will be initially released. VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop. Both of these products are featured in Cisco’s VXI architecture and will now be featured in VSPEX. Is this the year of VDI? I would say yes.

Data Protection – The often forgotten, but always need backup and recover solution tied into any virtualization project will be EMC Avamar and or Data Domai

How flexible is VSPEX

VSPEX is surprisingly flexible. The components specified in the architecture are explicitly called out as starting points to design around. You are allowed to substitute components as long as you stay within the sizing parameters and guidelines specified in each architecture document.

Personally this solves a big challenge that happens when selling a Vblock solution. Vblocks tend to be very rigid what your are allowed to do with them, and what and how something can be installed. This presents a challenge when a customer wants the speed of installation and single number support of a Vblock, but has requirements that drastically diverge from what Vblocks were designed for.  With VSPEX these customers can still have the safety and speed of delivery of a tested and validated solution, while benefiting from the flexibility of a reference architecture based solution.

Is VSPEX competitive with Vblock

There is technically a bit of overlap in the solutions, however the two offerings are really targeted to completely different customer and workloads. While there are some smaller Vblocks out there, the majority of Vblocks sold have been focused towards higher end solutions at Enterprise and Service Provider customers.

VSPEX is targeted to fill the gap that Vblocks tend to miss, which is the Mid-Market and SMB space. That Mid-Market space is the same space that NetApp has had so much success with the FlexPod offering. I expect VSPEX to provide these Mid-Market and SMB customers options that were not available to them from a Vblock solutions.

What is my verdict on VSPEX

EMC has brought together a strong reference architecture offering for the mid market with VSPEX. They are moving the ball one step forward by providing many of the benefits of Vblock in a flexible reference architecture delivered to Mid-Market customers. This is needed by EMC, Cisco and it’s channel partners and I fully expect it to be embraced by their joint customers.

 Similar Posts:

• VSPEX – EMC’s Flexible Reference Architecture Explained
• Three incredibly handsome men from Cisco, Nexus and EMC talk about VSPEX
• Cisco rounds out its portal and automation portfolio by acquiring Cloupia
• Cisco EMC and VMware partneship VCE VBlocks Acadia and the Partner Ecosystem
• Cisco’s Cloud Computing Offering
• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead

--Colin McNamara

VSPEX – EMC’s Flexible Reference Architecture Explained

What is VSPEX? There has been a bit of speculation floating around the industry the past couple of weeks regarding what EMC will be releasing. I have heard rumors spreading from the extreme of EMC create a new super version of VPLEX, to EMC creating a product wholly and completely competitive with Vblock (mentioned here by CRN last week talking about a VMAX based VPLEX). A few people, notable the folks at the register (VSPEX article here) have come quite a bit closer to the truth by calling out that a new reference architecture positioned to address the mid-market in a similar fashion to NetApp’s FlexPod offering.

The truth about VSPEX

VSPEX is a pre-validated set of reference architectures currently focused around Server Virtualization (cloud computing if you want to church it up) as well as end-user computing (VDI/VXI/Application Presentation Solutions). It fills the gap in EMC’s solution offerings that exists between a design and build your own solutions and their converged infrastructure product (VCE Vblock).

What components create VSPEX

Networking – VSPEX will be featureing Cisco’s Nexus 5548 Unified Port Switch as the networking component. This is the standard 10 gig switch used in Cisco’s other Validated Designs and is the standard platform for an aggregation layer for most Cisco based Data Centers.

Compute – Cisco Unified Computing System will be featured as the compute platform for VSPEX. For the mid market solutions that feature VNX storage Cisco B-Series blade centers will be recommend. For SMB focused solutions featuring VNXe storage Cisco’s C-Series servers will be featured.

Unified Storage – EMC VNX 5500/5300 Unified storage, supporting Fibre Channel, NFS and iSCSI will be offered for Mid Market solutions and VNXe supporting only IP protocols will be specified for SMB solutions.

Server Virtualization – Both VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V based validated and tested designs will be released. This is very interesting as both NetApp and EMC now have included Hyper-V as a supported scalable hypervisor. I personally have been a huge fan of VMware over the years, however I think that signs like this show that Hyper-V is increasingly penetrating both EMC and NetApp’s customer base.

End-User Compute (VDI) – Two solutions will be initially released. VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop. Both of these products are featured in Cisco’s VXI architecture and will now be featured in VSPEX. Is this the year of VDI? I would say yes.

Data Protection – The often forgotten, but always need backup and recover solution tied into any virtualization project will be EMC Avamar and or Data Domai

How flexible is VSPEX

VSPEX is surprisingly flexible. The components specified in the architecture are explicitly called out as starting points to design around. You are allowed to substitute components as long as you stay within the sizing parameters and guidelines specified in each architecture document.

Personally this solves a big challenge that happens when selling a Vblock solution. Vblocks tend to be very rigid what your are allowed to do with them, and what and how something can be installed. This presents a challenge when a customer wants the speed of installation and single number support of a Vblock, but has requirements that drastically diverge from what Vblocks were designed for.  With VSPEX these customers can still have the safety and speed of delivery of a tested and validated solution, while benefiting from the flexibility of a reference architecture based solution.

Is VSPEX competitive with Vblock

There is technically a bit of overlap in the solutions, however the two offerings are really targeted to completely different customer and workloads. While there are some smaller Vblocks out there, the majority of Vblocks sold have been focused towards higher end solutions at Enterprise and Service Provider customers.

VSPEX is targeted to fill the gap that Vblocks tend to miss, which is the Mid-Market and SMB space. That Mid-Market space is the same space that NetApp has had so much success with the FlexPod offering. I expect VSPEX to provide these Mid-Market and SMB customers options that were not available to them from a Vblock solutions.

What is my verdict on VSPEX

EMC has brought together a strong reference architecture offering for the mid market with VSPEX. They are moving the ball one step forward by providing many of the benefits of Vblock in a flexible reference architecture delivered to Mid-Market customers. This is needed by EMC, Cisco and it’s channel partners and I fully expect it to be embraced by their joint customers.

 Similar Posts:

• VSPEX – EMC’s Flexible Reference Architecture Explained
• Three incredibly handsome men from Cisco, Nexus and EMC talk about VSPEX
• Cisco rounds out its portal and automation portfolio by acquiring Cloupia
• Cisco EMC and VMware partneship VCE VBlocks Acadia and the Partner Ecosystem
• Cisco’s Cloud Computing Offering
• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead

--Colin McNamara

VSPEX – EMC’s Flexible Reference Architecture Explained

This is the second year that I have been a “shavee” for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation. This volunteer-driven charity funds more in childhood cancer research grants than any organization except the U. S. government.

This year I was able to not only involve myself and my friends in this charity, but I was also supported by the owners of Nexus who sponsored the bar tab at the Irvine St. Baldrick’s event.

I want to not only thank everyone who supported this great charity, but of course invite anyone else who is passionate about supporting cancer research to join in the fight and donate through my participant page linked below.

http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/colinmcnamara

 Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

I woke up shaved bald and with one eyebrow…

The picture on the left was taken back then. I was on staying in a hotel 110 nights a year and at on a flight at least twice a week. Living the jetset life was bringing me to a quick end to my life.

While I can talk all day about the journey from fat to skinny(er) I’d like to take the chance to share a couple key tools that helped me shed the pounds.

Getting back on the bike

I didn’t get to be 290 pounds in one day. I gained it one day at a time, while sitting at a desk typing on a computer (while eating something incredibly yummy). The human body is an amazing machine that reacts well to physical activity.

I personally found that getting back onto a bicycle provided a way for me to burn some calories while doing something that is very enjoyable. It also provided a physical activity that wasn’t as hard on my joints (which at 290 is a big risk) as running.

I ended up dragging one of my old racing bikes out of the garage, however that is not necessary for everybody. You burn just as many calories on a 150 dollar Walmart bike as you do riding 5000 dollar custom bike. What is important is that you are out being active, not what you are being active on.

What can’t be measured can’t be improved

Nobody wants to hear that you need to track your calories and weight to lose weight. But here it is – You have to track your calories and weight. Sorry, I know it sucks but you have to do it. Losing weight is simple math. Take in less calories then you need each day and you lose. Eat more then you need and you gain. How do you find out what your magic number of calories per day is? It is simple. You have what is called your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and the calories burned during daily activity. Put those both together and that is your calorie budget for the day. Now you just have to find some tool to track it.

I have used a tool called the daily burn tracker for a couple years now. There is a free option that allows you to track via a webpage, and also a low cost iPhone app that allows you to look up foods and log them throughout the day. This allows me to keep an eye on my food intake, and make sure that calories aren’t sneaking up on me.

After measuring the calories you put into yourself, it is important to measure the results. When I started losing weight I just used a spreadsheet to track my progress. As time moved on I got introduced to the Withings scale.

I have to say, this scale is awesome for the inner geek in you. It measures your weight, your body fat, and your BMI (Body Mass Index) all automatically. Not only does it do that, but it upload your statistics via WiFI to a personal private account on www.withings.com . After your data is there you can set it up to sync to other services, (such as dailyburn listed before) or to twitter if you are up for some public support and/or embarrassment.

One other item that Withings makes, and I use it he blood pressure monitor.

This plugs into your iPhone or iPad and automatically takes your blood pressure and resting pulse. This is uploaded to the same interface that you use to view your weight and fat percentages. I find that it provides yet another window into the state of my health, and also provides a great feedback loop when I am training to hard (resting heart rate in the morning will be elevated).

You have to find balance and enjoy yourself

It is easy to become myopic in focus and become consumed with hitting a calorie goal each and every day.

While it is good to be focused it is important to remember that becoming fat didn’t happen in a day, it took time. The same is true with getting skinny. It is a long road, and it is ok to have fun for a day, enjoy some drinks and a good meal in moderation and have a good time. Just remember, the next day to get back on track, capture those calories and continue on the road to the skinny you.Similar Posts:

• None Found

--Colin McNamara

I used to be fat – How I beat the bulge

Hadoop is an open source framework for processing and querying big data on clusters of commodity hardware. It was originally developed by Yahoo in 2006 as a clone of Google File System (GFS) and MapReduce framework used to store web search indexes and crawl data for the search engine Nutch.

In the last few years however developers have embraced MapReduce (the ability to map key pairs, and reduce them into small byte size computing chunks to distribute across hybrid storage/processing nodes), and have begun developing a vast array of applications that can utilize the distributed storage and compute capacity.

My Background with Hadoop

Back in 2006 I working for a startup in San Diego that did high dimensional mathematical analysis of financial transactions to quantify identity theft risk. Over the time I was there we went from an scale up batch system to serving 10,000 transactions a day to a scale out web service (today you would call it a cloud) that served millions of transactions a day all served under 250 milliseconds each.

To scale to that size under such strict latency requirements it was necessary to experiment with and implement some pretty cutting edge open source technologies. I cheated off the notes of Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo almost daily (thanks Jeremy, your knowledge and tools totally saved my butt many times). At that same time Jeremy’s team started doing some interesting work around distributed computing with Hadoop. Needless to say this was a technology I had to try. Hadoop was extremely young at the time, however for certain analytics workloads I was able to use 10 PC’s to outperform a half million dollars in compute and fibre channel storage.

Flash forward 6 years – Hadoop is all grown up

Over the past six years not only has Hadoops file system (HDFS) and processing (MapReduce) capabilities matured, but a suite of applications has been developed. These include tools to managed Hadoop clusters, large scale log analysis tools, scale out analytics packages and large scale distributed database applications.

The list of clients using hadoop has grown too. This ranges from Yahoo, Ebay and Facebook to enterprise customers like Fox, TMobile, Equifax and the New York Stock Exchange using Greenplum (Project R running on Hadoop). No longer is Hadoop a tool for a select few, it is now the next logical extension of the standard web service LAMP stack, and increasingly useful for Data Warehouse workloads.

Tuning the foundation – Hadoop and MapReduce

Many times when people talk about tuning parallel compute clusters like Hadoop, SunGrid or LSF they forget the obvious. They forget that the squeezing performance is about managing the delicate balance between applications and infrastructure.  When tuning that balance, you have to first segregate applications that directly access the hardware resources, and applications that access these apps. To create a frame of reference think of the relationship between Apache, MySQL and Disks in a LAMP architecture.

When dealing with Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and the MapReduce jobs that run on it there are three primary dimensions of tuning. These are dimensions are -

1. Tuning keystones in the infrastructure such as optimizing NameNode and Job Tracker server performance. (note memory sizing, tcp performance, cpu scaling)

2. Optimizing transfer of data between slave nodes in the HDFS cluster (note, bundled 1 gig / CPU)

3. Balancing I/O systems in slave nodes such as memory, server side flash, and spinning disk.

Optimizing NameNode and Job Tracker server performance

The NameNode in a Hadoop cluster is used to track the locations of the different file shards distributed across all slave nodes in the cluster. It is also used to house metadata for certain applications that reside in the Hadoop cluster. This puts specific strain on CPU, Memory and Network interfaces.

CPU / Network Interface

Certain processes inside of the name node do not take advantage of the multitude of cores available on today’s servers. The biggest offender in this case is the RPC server which processes network requests in a serial manner. Utilizing the fastest CPU as possible in conjunction with low latency network adapters such as Mellanox MNPH29D-XTR 10 Gig NIC, and low latency fabric switches such as the Nexus 5548. Optimizing the CPU and Network interface has significant effect on minimizing bottlenecks due to serialization delay of RPC requests.

Memory

NameNodes can use a lot of memory when servicing HDFS alone. The addition of layered applications on top of HDFS that utilize the NameNode as well as the increase in file numbers in HDFS only increase the importance of sufficient amounts of high speed memory.

Optimizing transfers between nodes in the HDFS cluster

Certain types of jobs such as sorts and greps (the basis for index generation) move significant amounts of data between nodes in the Hadoop cluster. Since the inception of Intel’s Nehalem processor family, single gigabit interface have presented bottlenecks when transmitting and receiving data. This inserts “slack time” in the cluster minimizing the time that slave node is actually processing data. The net result of this equals either slower job completion / response times or the unnecessary addition of additional nodes to the cluster (increasing your cost per job/transaction).

Impact of server bandwidth on job completion time

To illustrate this point please reference this test done by Intel on their own Hadoop cluster with a first generation Nehalem processor. Even then a single gigabit interface was not sufficient to service a node. In this case doubling the bandwidth to two gigabit by bonding interfaces together rebalanced the node. However if you follow Moore’s law, nodes utilizing Sandy Bridge CPU’s (due to release some time in 2012) will need four plus gigabit of network during a data transfer to avoid unnecessary wait times. Luckily this generation of server will have 10 Gig adapters built into the motherboard.

Network bandwidth and design

HDFS and the many of the applications that reside on top of it have the notion of a Rack ID. This can be used for fault isolation. For example if you had A/B racks on different power feeds you could ensure that redundant data shards are stored on nodes in different racks, and therefore increase the systems tolerance of faults.

This Rack Id can also be queried by higher level applications to ensure that jobs requiring high bandwidth data transfers are localized within say a pair of Nexus 5500′s with 10 gig fabric extenders. This would minimize the utilization of typically oversubscribed uplinks north of the access layer ensuring again, that nodes are not sitting idle while receiving data.

If however your application requirements do force you to expand jobs beyond the scaling capacity of a pair of low latency fabric extended switches. Maximizing your active paths between pods (groupings with the same rack.id) utilizing tools like Fabric Path create a layer two mesh between your pods can help in minimizing the wait time that a node may experience.

Minimizing I/O wait times in disk subsystems

There are many places where RAID or higher performance disk systems can yield benefits in the Hadoop cluster. One place is the MapReduce local directory. This is the place that mapped files are stored locally, adding multiple disks to this mount is one option. A second option which is gaining more and more traction is utilizing Solid State Disk (SSD) or PCIe based flash cards to present optimal IO for certain functions.

The graphic above, again from Intel demonstrates in a very simple fashion the impact of going from two to four disks in a node (doubling the IO). The result was completing the required job in one half the time. In simple terms, increasing the cost of the server by 10% increased its sort performance by 100%. Again performance increases vary by workload. However in a strict sense this increases the per server cost while decreasing the cost per job / transaction.

Reducing the Impact of Disk Spill

Disk spill is the result of the majority of the servers buffer being full of data during the map operation. Once a certain percentage of utilization is hit (normally 80%) a job is kicked off to write this data to disk, making room for more data. Adding more memory to the server to be used as a buffer for the Map operation minimizes disk spill ratio’s. This may increase the per server costs, but depending on your workload may end up your cost per job/transaction due to more efficient operation of your nodes. A second option, first explored by Intel in their chipset design clusters is to extend RAM into solid state cards inside of their servers.

Bringing it all together

Hadoop  supports a suite of applications that are used from the worlds largest web service providers to large enterprises. Uses include Data Warehousing, Analytics, Log analysis and large horizontally scaled databases.

Similar to other parallel compute systems such as Sun Grid Engine, or Platform LSF, a system wide approach to performance tuning must be used to ensure optimal performance as measured by cost per job / transaction. This system wide approach include server optimizations for specific server roles server roles such as large memory and PCIe Flash cards. As well as utilization of network equipment and topologies such as Nexus 5500 and fabric extenders to create low latency high bandwidth back planes ideally suited for Hadoop clusters.

Want to learn more?

Yahoo developers network Hadoop blog – http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/

Hadoop Distributed File Systems Architecture Guide – http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/current/hdfs_design.html

Big Data Network Design Considerations (Cisco) – http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps9441/ps9670/white_paper_c11-690561.html

Hadoop and Hbase applications for read intensive search – http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/hadoop-and-hbase-optimization-for-read-intensive-search-applications/

Evolution of Google File System – http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1594206

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--Colin McNamara

Tuning Hadoop and Hadoop driven applications

For the last two years I have been training with a goal of finishing the oldest bicycling event in history, Paris-Brest-Paris. This event has been held every 4 years since 1896, and is 1200 kilometers (roughly 750 miles) long. Roughly 700 of us Americans qualified to go this time, and I am one of them.

For those of you that want to track my progress while I am on the road ACP (the group who runs PBP) has implemented a RFID tracking system that will track me as I move between checkpoints on the course. You can monitor my progress starting on Aug 21st at 6:00 pm CEST (Paris Time) by going to the page below and entering in the frame number 4500.

http://www.paris-brest-paris.org/pbp2011/index2.php?lang=en&cat=accueil&page=edito

Frame number = 4500

Bonne Route!  –Colin

—-UPDATE —-

My results are below – I came in at 76 hours and 57 minutes (well under the 90 hour time limit for my group).

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--Colin McNamara

Tracking my progress during PBP 2011

After an awesome four and a half years I have decided to leave ePlus. My last day was June 8th.

I have to admit, it was an extremely hard decision. Of the past half of a decade ePlus has provided unquestioned support for “crazy” ideas like using service provider technology in enterprise designs, or focusing on this new and crazy “Data Center” thing four years ago. Having support to explore and thrive on the bleeding edge of technology while working with some of the largest customers in the world made every day an adventure.

The most transformational experiment for me personally was implementing an overlay model in the western area. I have to thank the Area VP and corporate leadership for taking the risk and allowing us to transform the business from Voice and R/S partner to the top Data Center partner in the west. Trusting and empowering us with this change was a huge opportunity, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without that experience. Thank you.

Over the years as people have changed employers I have always said that teams span corporate boundaries. I hope that as I embark on my next challenge that we continue that tradition and keep in touch.

I can be reached by the following methods -
Linkedin     http://www.linkedin.com/in/colinmcnamara
My blog       http://www.colinmcnamara.com
Twitter        http://www.twitter.com/colinmcnamara
Facebook    http://www.facebook.com/colin.mcnamara1
yahoo im    op_colin_mcnamara
google chat  mcnamara.colin

Thanks again for everything, It has been a blast.

–Colin McNamaraSimilar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Colin has left ePlus Technology

So many people linked, tweeted and posted on Facebook about my VMworld presentation submition #3221 Built to Fail. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for spreading the word. I should find out on June 1st whether I am presenting.

Again, thanks to everyone for all of your support.Similar Posts:

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• VMware approved as a Gold member of OpenStack Foundation

--Colin McNamara

Thank you for voting (VMworld Presentation)

for Tier 1 Virtualized Environments

Today’s virtualized Data Centers are not stand-alone environments. The availability and performance of these environments depends on complex inter-dependencies of networking, server, virtualization and storage vendor components. Behaviors of which can vary by vendor or even firmware version.

Not only are end to end configuration guides that encompass every element in these infrastructures rare, but there are so many elements that one minor mis-configuration may result in your virtualized datacenter not performing deterministically under all conditions. The same rigorous testing that is required for Tier 1 systems and networks in the physical work must now be mapped into the virtual infrastructure.

In this session we will explore testing tools and methodologies to validate a virtualized environments ability to meet SLA’s, and also track performance changes over time as new hardware, firmware, and software is introduced.

**Special needs of Tier 1 applications**

Availability –

Applications have a small window that you can lose packets before the application breaks. Is your convergence time under that? Voice apps require even stricter controls then this. Requirements include minimums among overall latency as well as the variation of latency as well as a maximum percentage of packet loss that can be sustained.

Quality Of Service –

Voice and video servers are starting to make their way into your virtualized infrastructures. There are specific prioritizations that need to occur at many physical and logical points in your infrastructure. Luckily these can be tested before you get a call about call quality issues.

Throughput –

Will that new app bring your cluster to its knees? Good thing to test first.

**Areas of increasing complexity in virtualized DC infrastructures**

What new components are showing up in our virtual infrastructure that can affect our SLA’s

-        Networking Components

-        Storage

-        Security

A single mis-configuration of bug in firmware of any one of these items can stop you from meeting your SLA’s. We will highlight common components that we need to test in Tier 1 virtualized infrastructures.

**QA and Acceptance testing methodology**

There is no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to QA and Acceptance testing. We will discuss common tests such as SRLG (Single Resource Link Group) failure tests along with common testing and report frameworks.

**Test tools and procedures **

It doesn’t take a million dollar test set to validate your infrastructure. We will review some great open source tools out there that use can use to validate Availability, Quality of Service, and Throughput as well as show a couple of my favorites in action.

Call to Action - If you want to hear all this and more, vote for my VMworld presentation here

http://www.vmworld.com/cfp.jspaSimilar Posts:

• Measuring and mitigating risk involved with sharing virtual infrastructure between DMZ and Internal environments
• Come to my session on surviving your first commit at OpenStack summit
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• VMworld 2009 Schedule
• Cisco Unified Computing System Quoting and Configuration with Netformx

--Colin McNamara

Vote for my VMworld presentation – #3221 Built to fail (shameless pandering)

Are you a single or multiple CCIE who can present with confidence one minute, step to a whiteboard and do a design session and then  hop on a device and configure high end solutions the next?

Are you looking for an opportunity to work with the largest and most challenging enterprise customers in Silicon Valley, working with bleeding edge products and designs?

Do you want to work on a team with 18 CCIE’s nationwide, and 5 in this office alone?

If so, you are in luck. We are adding another senior engineering position to our enterprise sales team. If you have the traits listed above you just might be a great addition to the team.

A little background on ePlus -

ePlus is a national DVAR with 20 offices across the nation. It was founded in 1990 and is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol PLUS. We have 690 employees nationally, of which 160+ were senior engineers. You would be working in the Sunnyvale California office which has just over 50 employees of which 25 are engineers.

So do you have what it takes?

Sorry recruiters, this is for direct candidates only.Similar Posts:

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• Resume – Colin McNamara, CCIE #18233

--Colin McNamara

Are you a kick ass engineer looking to grow?

Is the person you are speaking to understanding the subject? Are you going so slow that you are boring them to death? Did you stumble on an organizational landmine an inadvertently offend someone? Who in the room is actually making the decision? It may not be who you think. Is the customer ready to make a decision? All these are good questions to ask when you are presenting a solution, or educating a person or group on a technology. The secret is, you don’t need to ask. The person across the table is telling you. They are telling you through positioning of their body and their movements (commonly known as body language).

When you take into account cultural differences (which there are some distinct body language differences between cultures), a significant portion of communication is communicated non verbally.

One experiment I do when a new systems engineer (SE) joins the organization is to sit in as a coach in a customer meeting. I am there as a safety net while they position a product, or design a solution. After the meeting is concluded we get sit down and do a debriefing. Our focus however is not the technical accuracy of the solution, or how to further help the customer (there is a process of checks and balances for this however). The purpose of the debrief is to discuss what reactions people had to certain content, and specifically to ascertain whether the presenter picked up on these cues. If the cues were picked up, that is great. If not some simple tips and supplemental training can be recommended to help the engineer develop an awareness of these non verbal messages.

What are some common non verbal cues

One thing to get out of the way, is that no single cue can give a clear picture of a persons state (with the exception of flipping the bird). But if you combine multiple cues together you can usually get a good idea of what is going on mentally or emotionally with a person.

Closing off – The crossing of the arms in front of the body. This can indicate a few things. In general this can signal that the person is uncomfortable. You can confirm this by checking out their facial expressions.  This sense of discomfort may be due to fear (afraid of public speaking ), or due to anger (you may have discussed a Cisco UCS solution when they want to go HP).

What to do – I find the best way to deal with this is to be very aware of when this posture occurred. If there person was closed off as they sat down, they may just be uncomfortable in the new surroundings or with new people. If the person closed off right after you made a statement however, it is best to pause an ask peoples thoughts on that statement and address the issue before moving on. If you don’t you run the risk of every thing you talk about afterward not sinking in.

Smiling – This is an easy one to pick up on. It however is commonly forgotten when YOU are the one presenting.  A person who smiles and has a “bright” face is much more likely to be accepted into a positive discussion. I personally have to be acutely aware of this because my default “blank” face can be quite stern. (think Marine Drill Instructor before his coffee).

What to do – Before a meeting or presentation I do facial stretches. These are extreme yawning movements and open up your face. The result is that you don’t unintentionally make anyone uncomfortable due to a stern look.

Leaning back with the hands in back of the head – You have just found the Alpha Male (or Alpha Geek if you are in Silicon Valley). This person is demonstrating his superiority. The most common situation is that this is the boss. If this is not the boss this may be a technical decision maker. Be prepared to field some pointed questions about esoteric items as you establish credibility with this person.

What to do – Be aware that if you challenge this persons authority or knowledge you may just derail the meeting. Getting in a battle of wills trying to see who is the Alpha will go no where. Establish credibility in a non threatening way. Be open and inclusive in your discussions paying special notice to this persons ideas. Ideally take one of their ideas and statements and use that as a keystone for demonstrating your idea or making your point. If you can pull that off not only will you have diffused the threat of derailing the meeting you will have created an advocate in the organization.

These were just four common non verbal cues. To cover all of them would take a book. Luckily there are many books on this subject.

Elbow on the table with the thumb and forefinger split supporting the chin – This is a good one. This person is interested and engaged. If they are maintaining eye contact you are communicating well. If their eyes go off to the side or up they ma be contemplating your message.

What to do  – If their eyes are straight ahead keep doing what you are doing. The audience is interested and engaged and this is exactly where you need to be. Stay aware of this as it is a great sanity check that you are on track. If the eyes move up and behind though you may want to slow things down with some pauses to allow this person to complete their thought. They may have an important question to ask and you don’t want to miss the opportunity to answer it. In any case if they are thinking they are not listening to new content so doing a quick comprehension check is a good thing.

Pulling it all together

As engineers, many of us focus on providing a technical accurate and detailed solutions. This alone is not always sufficient to position a specific solution. By becoming aware of non verbal communications from your audience you will become aware of organizational dynamics, as well as become better at recognizing whether you are on target for the technical level of your audience members.

Want to learn more?

The best book I have read on non verbal communication is called -

The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease.

This covers both the high level body language cues as well as detailing some very minute yet important positioning a posturing details. I would say this book is a must read if you are going to operate in any sales engineering organization.

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--Colin McNamara

Non Verbal Communication for Sales Engineers

So then I ask the question, why do some excel while others struggle in this industry?

The importance of soft skills

Given that most of the engineers in our industry have equal access to training, and roughly equal capacity to absorb that knowledge. The key differentiators in my opinion are the soft skills that the engineer is equipped with.

What is a soft skill? I break soft skills down into four key areas

1. The science of interaction – Understanding the fundamentals of non verbal verbal communication.

2. Organizational and workload management skills – Skills and systems that are the foundation of a “dependable” person.

3. Emotional / Organization intelligence – Reading peoples motivations and emotional influences on their decisions and actions.

4, Presentation skills – How to clearly communicate your ideas including to an audience of two or two hundred.

So much time and  effort is spent on attaining the latest certification, or attending the latest course that the fundamentals of human interaction can be overlooked. An engineer who masters these four areas will without a doubt differentiate themselves from their peers. Engineers who ignore these key fundamentals of human interaction can still be successful (I would reference many amazing engineers with Asperger’s syndrome) however they tend to gravitate to back-end engineering roles where interpersonal skills are not as critical to success.

Pulling it all together

As engineers, many of us focus on providing a technical accurate and detailed solutions. This alone is not always sufficient to position a specific solution or navigate to complicated waters of organizational interactions. By developing soft skills as well as technical skills you will you will become aware of organizational dynamics, as well as become better at recognizing whether you are on target for the technical level of your audience members.

Want to learn more?

Expect to see articles from me in the near future covering-

1. The science of interaction – Posted

2. Organizational and workload management skills

3. Emotional / Organization intelligence

4, Presentation skills

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--Colin McNamara

Taking a Sales Engineer from good to great

Reason #1  – Super secret projects

I have been doing detailed design work for a couple REALLY LARGE data centers clients (the type that dominate top 10 lists) . These builds were extremely sensitive, and inadvertently  leaking internal information would not have been a good thing. Since I tend to write about what I am currently working on, I had decided to limit my posting just to avoid the chance of leaking any specific design elements.

Reason #2 – Business is booming

Things got really busy. For me the great recession of 2009 was spent aggressively marketing new product lines and attracting new talent. There is a saying that your marketing dollars go twice as far during a down turn. That saying is completely true. Every day was spent working my tail off to ensure that the region stayed afloat. During that time there were zero layoffs, as well as some key talent acquisitions.

During that same time many of the competitors in my region were forced to downsize their team, and limit the amount of time and money they spent helping their clients. While I can understand the business conditions that can force you to make the decision to lay off, it isn’t the best long term strategy to put your best talent onto the market. It is like burning your winter clothing in a blizzard. In the short term it seems like a good decision, but in the long term you will pay dearly.

Avoiding layoffs, doubling down on marketing, and aggressively supporting Cisco’s entrance into the server market all came together and resulted in my region dominating the stack rankings, taking and holding number one positions in Enterprise, Select and Commercial regions in 2010. In retrospect this could be written up into a case study how to grow a business during an economic downturn. Dominating the market however translates into your free time being dominated. Luckily I work with extremely capable and talented Sales and Engineering teams, which was the only thing that saved me from going insane from the amount of work this last year.

Getting to number one isn’t easy. Staying number one is harder still.

Reason #3 – Certifications

If I haven’t been in a design session I have been nose down in a book this year. I had to re-certify a bunch of my certs as well as add EMC’s Technical Architect and Implementation engineer to balance out my NetApp certifications. I also managed to create a nice amount of work for myself by contributing to design sessions around the joint VMware / Cisco data center certifications. Pretty much every suggestion I threw up on the board got implemented, and I ended up having to pass quite a few tests to fill those roles for my current employer.

Reason #4 – Getting healthy

The day I got back from Networkers in 2009 I had one of those life changing moments that was just the kick in the pants I needed. As of writing this article I am down 92 pounds from that day. I have changed my dietary habits to something resembling what humans are intended to eat, as well as started racing bicycles again.

Being competitive on a bike requires quite few hours a week, and that has cut into time that I had previously scheduled to write. Thankfully I learned a lot about effective training this last year, and I am making much better use of my training hours now. This is resulting in much more free time for writing.

What can you expect to hear about in 2011?

I would look forward to some very cool stuff. Most of the technologies from Cisco I have been working with have become public, and don’t have NDA restrictions around them. The NetApp and EMC (FlexPod and VBlock) solutions are both developing nicely and in the public domain now. There are still quite a few topics that are off limits, but now there are more things that I can talk about vs things I cannot talk about.

In short, I’m back. Expect more from me soon.Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Where was Colin in 2010?

The Problem

Apparently when the UCS pod’s firmware was updated to 1.3(1c) an interesting bug was encountered. What happens is when you associate your service profile to a server which has had another service profile associated with it previously you a config failure error stating that the local disk config you are applying is destructive to the physical server and violates a requirement.

I headed over to the local disk policies section of UCSM to see what was going on. Once I got there I noticed a new check box labeled “Protect Configuration”.

It’s a lab, which means that change controls should be followed but rarely are. Following that mantra and went ahead and unchecked the “Protect Configuration” box on one of the commonly used local disk policies and saved my changed. A little background on HOW I am shelled into this lab. I am shelled in via a VMware View server that has component installed on blades 1 and 2 of this chassis. And, yes the local disk configuration that I made a change to was used by these profiles.

A little while later, after all the servers went through a reboot and settings application cycle and a coworker kicked a View server in the butt I was back in. The first thing I did was try to apply my service profile. I got the same error message.

I went back to the local disk config profile section to see if maybe the change hadn’t applied. But, when I edited the profile, it showed that the local disk config should not be in a protected configuration.

However when I went into a service profile to change the same local disk policy, you will notice that this same local disk config was still showing up as a protected configuration.

The Solution

When you encounter a bug, the first thing you do if the obvious isn’t working is check the release notes. This bug did show up int he 1.3 release notes, with a tag of “no workaround”. I don’t believe in not having workarounds so proceeded to bang my head up against a wall trying time consuming things like rediscovering servers, recovering bios’s, creating custom firmware packs and more.

After all that failed, I tried the simple things (you like the reverse order?). My excuse was that I assumed that TAC who had created the bug had already tried this. I guess I should assume less often…

The simple thing, that I should have done from the start was create a brand new local disk profile. I named this profile FIX-PERSIST-ANY, choosing to use any local disk config and expressly making it non-persistent. I then applied the same local disk policy that was on previously to my service profile, and then once applied changed it to FIX-PERSIST-ANY.

At that point I whatever flag that had gotten stuck in the UCSM database got unstuck and I was able to get my service profile applied.

Moral of the story

Just because a bug shows no workaround, it doesn’t mean you can’t fix it. It just means that the engineer who submitted the bug wasn’t able to.

Now I can finally get around to what I was originally trying to do today, getting scripted PXE installs of ESXi 4.1 working.Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Fixing UCS Config Failures due to local disk config requirements

Why was I traveling so much?

Two years ago I was asked to team up with a good friend and start a data center practice by my regional vice president. We put together a strong go to market strategy, that tied in strongly with key product initiatives from Cisco and other vendors. To make a long story short, it was immensely successful. It was so successful that we transformed the region from being seen as a Voice and Service Provider partner to being the top Data Center partner in the operation, capturing the #1 places in both Enterprise and Select.

This level of success came with a price. Originally I had negotiated that every third week I would spend three days in Silicon Valley. With each win came additional mind and market share. We were able to use that success to attract some amazing individuals, which created even more buzz and business. In the blink of an eye my travel schedule had been transformed from a manageable three days every third week to Tuesday through Thursday pretty much every week. There was even one stretch where for six weeks I was only home for two days (one day was flying down to San Diego for a lunch and to grab a change of clothes).

Work Life Balance

The funniest thing, is that I am probably one of the most militant work life balance fanatics that I know. I make it clear to everyone that I am a father and a husband first, and an employee second. When I maintain that balanced life I am more valuable to the company (and my family) then if that equation is reversed.

One story I like to tell is of a former boss who ran software sales for DEC in Europe. He lived in Boston at the time and spent over three hundred nights a year abroad. The saddest thing I have ever seen was him trying to create a relationship with his daughter while she was going away to college. Eighteen years that you can never get back were flushed down the toilet in exchange for corp card  dinners and fancy hotels. I witnessed this after spending eighteen hours a day working at my last startup, and pretty much missing the first year of my son’s life. I had vowed to never fall in this trap again, however the success of our data center practice had set the stage for history to repeat itself.

The tipping point

The more time you spend away from your family, the harder it is on your wife and kids. This was becoming readily apparently to me late last year. I sat down and talked with Ashley and discussed some alternatives. I could step down from a leadership position in our regional DC practice, and return to focusing on Systems Engineering for our Health Care and Indian Gaming practice. I could leave my current job and take a Director role at a company local to me. Or we could move the family up to Silicon Valley where 80% of my travel was.

I brought these options up to our leadership. I didn’t pose it as a threat, just a harsh reality. Something had to give, and I wasn’t going to fall into the trap that so many other people do of choosing their job over their family. Luckily I work with some very good people, who understood exactly where I was coming from. Our leadership all the way up to the C level recognized my issue and we settled on option number three, relocating me and my family to Silicon Valley.

Life in Silicon Valley

Choosing from all the varied towns in the bay was a tough one, but we ended up settling down not far from where I first came to the bay during the dot com boom – San Ramon. It has good schools, it is about 45 minutes from the high tech clients in the south bay as well as the same distance from the financial clients in San Francisco. Yes, traffic sucks. But luckily I still work from home, so most of my travel is off commute times heading to client meetings or speaking at events.

The best thing about being up here is that Silicon Valley really starts going at 10:00 am. This means that I can sit down and have a proper breakfast with my kids almost every day. After a year of hotels and Starbucks breakfasts, being able to make some omelets and get an ear full about the latest cartoon superhero drama is just awesome. I am now able to be the dad and husband that I should be. I am present in my family’s life, as well as fully energized to kick ass at work. What more can you ask for?Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Colin has moved to the San Francisco Bay Area

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--Colin McNamara

Cisco Live 2010 Schedule

VBlock Infrastructure Packages

VBlock infrastructure packages are pre-configured bundles that are sized to support specific workloads. These packages are available to run both on the customer site, as well as in a hosted (cloud) facility. If you have been listening to anything that has come out of VMware in the past couple years, it has been centered around the unification of private and public clouds. VBlock is a building block of this integrated cloud.

The VBlock infrastructure packages are offered in “bundles”. These bundles are numbered 0-2 at the time of writing.

VBlock 0 is an entry level package supporting 300-800 virtual machines. This is built on Cisco UCS, EMC Celerra Unified Storage, VMware vSphere and the Nexus 1000v.

VBlock 1 is a mid level package supporting 800 – 3000 virtual machines. This is built on Cisco UCS, Cisco MDS, EMC Clarion, VMware vSphere and the Nexus 1000V

Vblock 2 is a high end package supporting 3000 – 6000 virtual machines. This is buit on Cisco UCS, Cisco MDS, EMC Symmetrix V-Max, VMware vSphere and the Nexus 1000V

Integrated Pre-Sales, Service and Support – Fighting the skill silo

The defining factor in the successfully sales and deployment of virtualization infrastructure has been cross platform knowledge and experience. Storage, Network, and Virtualization vendors, as well as partners have struggled to attract and train engineering and sales forces with this cross functional skillset. Partners who have engineering teams with skills that cross these functional areas have seen success even in this down economy. Cisco EMC and VMware are smart enough to recognize this trend and have linked sales teams at the hips in engagements. Nothing makes this more apparent than John Chambers himself addressing Field Sales in the VCE webcast and requiring that these teams coordinate and act as one cohesive unit.

Acadia

Cisco, EMC and VMware have jointly funded a venture called Acadia. This venture, initially staffed at 120 employees is charted with the development and validation of cross platform solutions. They are focused on a “build operate transfer” model for service providers and large enterprise customers. The target date for Acadia’s launch is Q1 2010.

Partner Ecosystem

This was my biggest worry about this release. Does Cisco, VMware and EMC funding Acadia mean that they are going to go direct and bypass their channel? The party line is no, that all three partners will still utilize the channel to sell and distribute the VBlocks. An interesting new twist however is that there is not one master partner certification to sell “validated” VBlock solutions. To participate a partner has to be certified at reasonably high levels with all three partners to have the ability to register and sell deals under the VBlock mantra.

What hasn’t been clearly answered is what happens when a workload is moved to the “cloud”. Does that go through the channel? What if that cloud infrastructure is built onsite but maintained by Acadia? It sounds like we have to wait till January 2010 to get that answer. In the end time will tell whether Cisco will hold true to the success they have found in the channel, or whether Cisco will end up in an MBA case study of what not to do.

Want to learn more ?

Enterprise Strategy Groups write up

Scott Lowe – VCE quick thoughts

Joint Offering Portal – Privatecloud.com

Chad Sakac – an insiders view of VCE

Cisco Press Release on VCESimilar Posts:

• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel
• VSPEX – EMC’s Flexible Reference Architecture Explained
• VSPEX – EMC’s Flexible Reference Architecture Explained
• VMworld 2009 Schedule
• Cisco Nexus 5020 and 5010 FCOE video ordering guide
• New features in VMware 3.1

--Colin McNamara

Cisco EMC and VMware partneship VCE VBlocks Acadia and the Partner Ecosystem

What does this mean?  In Cisco’s view of the world this means supporting the transport of Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS in a scalable and dependable fashion.

What is the Nexus 4000?

The Nexus 4000 is the 5th release of the Nexus line of switches (counting the UCS 6100 as a release).  This switch fits in the blade center form factor. It is intended to be used in the place of the Catalyst 3000 and 3100 series blade switches. It is a full featured Nexus switch, very similar to it’s big brother the Nexus 5000.

What protocols will it support?

In keeping with Cisco’s vision of a Unified IO platform in the data center the Nexus 4000 will support Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) (yes, they finally caved on the naming) as well as providing the same reliable transport of iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS that you get with the Nexus 5000.

What blade centers will it work with?

Cisco is playing close to the chest announcing what blade server vendors will support this product.

My initial gut reaction was that HP would not be supporting this product, however I just saw that HP is OEM’ing the Nexus 5020. It would make sense that they would support the Nexus 4000 in their C Class blade centers, though only time will tell.

IBM however has been very supportive of integrating Cisco technology, as well as OEM’ing the Nexus 5000 switch in their portfolio. I fully expect the Nexus 4000 to be supported in the IBM BladeCenter platform, though again I cannot confirm.

Dell also has resold Cisco blade switches, and although they do not OEM the nexus 5000 they have been large proponents of the Nexus solution and unification of IO workloads throughout their platforms.

Is it the same as a Fabric Extender?

The Nexus 4000 is not a Fabric Extender. What is the difference? A Fabric Extender is a really efficient multiplexer. While using a Fabric Extender the main goal is vast simplification. What you end up with is a dumbed down remote line card that provides simple, fast services to your access layer. This is great for most uses, however there are instances where you need to provide richer services. A full function switch like the Nexus 4000 is appropriate in this case.

What does it run?

The Nexus 4000 runs NX-OS, Cisco’s data center switching operating system. This is the fourth release of what was previously named SAN-OS which ran on Cisco’s MDS line of SAN switches. This operating system is shared between the Nexus 7000, 5000, 4000, 1000v,UCS Fabric Interconnect and MDS line of SAN switches. Now you can have a consistent operating system platform from your data center core, all the way down through your blade switches and into your virtualization layer.

When will it be available?

Just like when the 3000 and 3100 series blade switches got announced, we are going to have to wait on the individual server manufactures to announce support at their own pace. My gut feel says we will be waiting a couple months for units to get out, and for the vendor certification process to complete. Though with business picking back up, this product may get out sooner.Similar Posts:

• Simplifying your Data Center with Cisco’s Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender (FEX)
• Cisco Nexus 7000 DataCenter switch released – Welcome to DataCenter 3.0
• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel
• Cisco NX-OS 4.0 | Next Generation Internet Operating System
• Cisco introduces the C-Series Rack Servers
• Simplifying scale out DataCenter design with UCS Manager 2.1

--Colin McNamara

Cisco Nexus 4000 Blade Switch

Intellectual capital driving the cloud

It is wise to follow the movements of thought leaders in Silicon Valley. Why is that? Because when enough smart people land at the same company, it is only a matter of time something great happens. This “human network” of intellectual capital has been the seed of many successful tech companies, and will continue to be true in the future.

One of these tech companies with a wealth of intellectual capital is Arista Networks. There are A LOT of ex Cisco folks walking the halls of Arista. Many of them come from the Granite Systems acquisition (Cisco’s 4500 platform). This platform, while designed with line card oversubscription to keep it between the 3560 and 6500 platforms in price and performance has an extremely elegant internal architecture. Case in point, the 4500 platform has had in service software upgrade (ISSU) for over two years, something that the 6500 still struggles with.

Now that this team, and key leaders from Cisco and other tech companies are putting together a network platform, what can they do? And more importantly, what will they do?

Before I dive into that answer, I think it is important to take a quick overview of the two major camps of network platform development, and what the advantages and drawbacks of each method is.

Creating your own ASICS in house

The first way is to create your own ASICS that handle switching and security functions. In this case, you are effectively a chipset manufacturer, who then bundles your own chipsets into routing, switching and security platforms. On one hand, developing your own ASICS can give you a competitive advantage by rolling in features that are not available to your competitors.

On the downside however because of the high cost of developing these chipsets you are forced to design for a very long lifecycle (7+ years). Another downside is that if you have any problems with manufacturing, you cannot just call up another supplier and change your sourcing strategy because you are that supplier. In the case of any Fab issues you are forced to slip your product delivery dates.

Utilizing market silicon

The second way is to utilize routing, switching, and security ASICS that are commercially available through many manufacturers and wrap your own software and chassis integration around them. This is commonly referred to as “market silicon”. In this case, your focus is end to end integration of commodity ASICS and most importanly creating  software differentiation to add value to your product.

The positives aspects of this model is that you are not locked into your own chipset design time lines. If your primary chipset supplier has a Fab issue, then you can easily change your supplier and hit your deployment time lines.

The downsides of this model is that every single networking manufacture in the world has access to the same chipsets. This forces a vendor to differentiate through better software, support, and integration of these “Market Silicon” ASICS into a superior platform.

Who uses what?

With all the talk of Market Silicon being evil, the reality is that the major networking manufacturers use a mix of home grown ASICS and market silicon to drive their products. I can’t say who uses what, but feel free to crack open your switch and take a look at the chipsets on the line cards. Don’t be surprised if you can find some market silicon sprinkled here and there. Now that doesn’t mean that these platforms are bad, it just means that for certain functions it is cheaper to source ASICS externally then to create them in house.

How does Arista approach this problem?

Aristas focus is to create an extensible network operating system that can manage and enable multiple switching ASICS and switching platforms (VMware Virtual Network Distributed Switch – vNDS).

Extensible Operating System (EOS/vEOS)

Arista created a new operating plaform, based on Linux that manages both the physical and virtual implementations of switching devices (ASIC and Virtual Switches). It is called the Extensible Operating System. This operating system has hooks into all the ASICS and vSwitches that it supports. Most importantly it provides one single operating system for all supported platforms both physical and virtual.

sysDB

Core to the functionality of EOS is the sysDB. What is the sysDB? It is a custom real time database written specifically for the interaction of individual system processes. These include routing, switching, security, management processes. By centralizing all of this information in a central location the time to react to events is minimized . This is especially true when compared to classic networking implementations where independent processes keep independent state.

vEOS

Virtual Extensible Operating system is just that – A virtualized instance of the items mentioned above. This can be run inside a vmware virtual machine. It is the same operating system, database, and daemons that run on Arista’s physical hardware. The only difference that it happens to run inside of your virtual infrastructure.

You may ask the question, why would you want to take a network operating system / hardware combination and split it apart?

vEOS and VMware Virtual Distributed Network Switch

EOS and vEOS have implemented a hook into VMware’s vNetwork Distributed Switch (vNDS) API. In effect, you can think of the vNDS as just another ASIC to the operating system. Instead of connected through a device driver, EOS and vEOS connect in through an XML API. This accomplished the function of both retrieving status and performance information that the vNDS provides, and creating policies inside EOS and publishing them into your VMware switching infrastructure.

If you have an Arista switch directly northbound of your ESX servers, you get this monitoring and configuration feature for free. If you don’t have Arista switches, (say you have Cisco, HP, Juniper or Foundary) you can use vEOS (the virtual instance) and pay a fee to get a cli interface into the VDS.

vEOS vs Nexus 1000V

This is a likely to be a highly contested item, complete with competing bumper stickers. In my opinion it isn’t that big of a deal. The reason being is that the 1000v and Arista’s vEOS implementation are completely different. Cisco’s 1000V is a dedicated piece of code running on your ESX servers that handles switching differently then VMware’s vNDS. Arista’s implementation of EOS and vEOS is more of a management interface to VMwares vNDS. vEOS does not replace the switch inside VMware, it configures and monitors it through the vNetwork API.

When comparing the two products head to head, the discussion is really a VMware vNDS vs Nexus 1000v discussion. If you have already decided to move to the 1000V because of the feature differential between the native vNDS then nothing really changes.

This doesn’t mean that vEOS does not add value. In smaller environments where the 1000V is not an option, or in an intercloud situation where state needs to be passed between disparate network instances vEOS’s vNDS implementation can be very valuable. If the vNDS features are all you need, but you would prefer a CLI for your VMware switching and cannot justify the expense for the 1000V licenses, then Arista might be right for you.

Want to learn more?

Arista Networks – Extensible Operating System

Andy Bechtolsheim‘s opinion on Market ASICs

VMware Virtual Network Distributed Switch

Cisco Systems – Nexus 1000V

Similar Posts:

• Jayshree Ullal takes the helm of Arista Networks
• VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead
• Breaking the 200 nanosecond barrier with Algo Boost on the Nexus 3548
• Cisco Nexus 4000 Blade Switch
• Cisco NX-OS 4.0 | Next Generation Internet Operating System
• Cisco’s Cloud Computing Offering

--Colin McNamara

Arista Networks – Their approach to cloud networking

If you happen to be in the same class, or see me passing in the hall, feel free to pull me aside and say hi.

Tuesday
10:00 AM-11:00 AM	EA3605 Room 302	Virtualizing Tier 1 Applications: The Value of the vSphere Internal Cloud as a Better Platform for Apps
11:30 AM-12:30 PM	VM4800 Room 110	The “Next Generation Data Center” for Telecommunication Companies
1:00 PM-2:00 PM	SS5240 Room 134	Engineering Developments Enabling the Virtual Datacenter – VMware, Cisco and EMC
2:00 PM-3:30 PM	EA3234 Room 104	Virtualizing SQL Server in a VMware vSphere environment
4:00 PM-5:00 PM	VM2472 Room 303	Introduction to VMware vCenter Chargeback
6:00 PM-7:00 PM	EA1820 Room 310	Virtualizing Critical Healthcare Applications

Wednesday
10:00 AM-11:00 AM	TA3286 Room 132	Applications in the Cloud: Getting off the ground
11:30 AM-12:30 PM	EA2583 Room 110	HPC/Grid Computing and Virtualization
1:00 PM-2:00 PM	TA1962 Room 121	How and Why we Upgraded Herning Kommune’s Production Environment to vSphere 4.0 at GA
2:30 PM-3:30 PM	TA4100 Room 303	Internal Clouds: Customer perspective and implementations
4:00 PM-5:00 PM	VM3881 Room 309	Business Objects SAP Virtual Infrastructure Lab Manager Deployment and An Overview of the Best Practices and Process of Migrating Between Network Ranges

Thursday
9:30 AM-11:30 AM	LAB11 Nob Hill A	VMware vCenter Chargeback
11:30 AM-12:30 PM	TA4881 Room 132	Designing Dynamic Data Centers with NetApp and VMware
12:30 PM-2:30 PM	LAB09 Salon 4	VMware vCenter AppSpeed
2:30 PM-3:30 PM	EA3241 Room 301	Beyond Infrastructure as a Service: Developer and Runtime Services with VMware and our Partners
4:00 PM-5:00 PM	EA3481 Room 301	Virtualization of Analytic Databases

Similar Posts:

• Cisco EMC and VMware partneship VCE VBlocks Acadia and the Partner Ecosystem
• Cisco’s Cloud Computing Offering
• Where is Colin ? Passing the VCP exam (VMware Certified Professional)
• Interesting TechWise TV episode on virtualization
• Vote for my VMworld presentation – #3221 Built to fail (shameless pandering)
• Is your network ready for Cloud Computing with Virtual Infrastructure 4?

--Colin McNamara

VMworld 2009 Schedule

You may notice that I am using a tool called Netformx. You may ask – since this is a Cisco product, why aren’t we using the Dynamic Configuration Tool or the MultiLine Configurator? The answer that was given to me was that UCS requires a bottom up configuration. It requires that you start with the type and number of systems, and then work your way up to the amount of Chassis, FEX’s, links and Fabric Interconnects that are required. All of the workflows in Cisco’s existing tools require a top down approach. Until the new configuration workspace is released from Cisco, Netformx is your only option to quote any UCS product.

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Thank you for taking the time to watch this walk through. If you found this helpful, please feel free to leave a comment or ping me on twitter.Similar Posts:

• Twitter Updates for 2008-06-05
• Cisco Nexus 5020 and 5010 FCOE video ordering guide
• Simplifying scale out DataCenter design with UCS Manager 2.1
• Cisco NX-OS 4.0 | Next Generation Internet Operating System
• Simplifying remote site security with Cisco’s new video surveillance modules on the ISR
• Vote for my VMworld presentation – #3221 Built to fail (shameless pandering)

--Colin McNamara

Cisco Unified Computing System Quoting and Configuration with Netformx

What does this certification entail?

1. CCDE Certified

Yes, now the CCDE will now get MUCH more popular. You will have to pass your CCDE practical before you have a chance to submit an application to the CCA Board.

2. 10 Years industry experience

A common theme that I have sense from the CCDE team (the team who created the CCA) is that the CCIE does not hold the same value as it held 10 years ago. An experience requirement from the CCA not only a certain pedigree of CCA candidates, as well as the wealth of experience that time provides.

3. Application to “the board”

Translation, be careful what you put on twitter. A board, most likely consisting of Bruce Pinsky, Russ White and the other usual players will evaluate your application. If your application is accepted then you get to face the board.

4. Passing The board examination

Interestingly enough, I see this as the most straight forward portion of the entire CCDE / CCA process. The board exam itself is set to model a normal customer interaction for a network architect. For those of us that do this every day this is straight forward.

First, you have a customer that has a requirement. You gather that requirement generally in writing first. Then you have a chance to interview the customer to gather additional requirements, and more importantly the reasoning behind the requirement.

After that, you go and create a proposal that takes into account all of the requirements, applications, and “gotchas” that may happen. Create Diagrams, Bill of Materials and a Solution Overview.

You present this proposal to the customer, and defend all the aspects of your proposal. Again, this is a common customer engagement. Cisco is mirroring this whole process. The two major changes involved are are 1. the customer is “the board” and instead of making a sale, you get your CCA.

Want to learn more – Cisco Certified Architect Press ReleaseSimilar Posts:

• Cisco Certified Design Expert – CCDE – officially released by Cisco
• I’ll be at Cisco Live 2008 (networkers) in Orlando all week
• Passed CCDE written and Recertified my CCIE – Killed two birds with one stone
• It’s on like Donkey Kong – CCDE practical registration is open
• My experience taking the CCDE Practical Beta
• CCDE Practical – Beta candidate deadline August 1 2008

--Colin McNamara

Cisco Certified Architect – Board examination above the CCIE and CCDE

Schedule note – My good friend Rick and I normally alternate picking which classes to attend each year. Last year I picked classes mostly out of the new developers track. This is Rick’s year to choose, so there are a bunch of really fun high end service provider and route switch tracks (would you expect any less from a quintuple CCIE). It should be a blast!

Sunday
5:00 PM-10:00 PM	Poker night / Hog cookout ePlus engineering	Poker night / Hog cookout ePlus engineering

Monday
8:00 AM-5:00 PM	TECCCDE-3005 Moscone S306	CCDE: The Cisco Certified Design Expert
5:30 PM-8:30 PM	WoS Reception 1 World of Solutions	World of Solutions 20th Anniversay Reception

Tuesday
7:30 AM-9:30 AM	BRKVVT-2112 Moscone W2014	Cisco Telepresence Network Infrastructure Design for Service Providers
10:00 AM-11:30 AM (Conference Event)	GENKEY-5501 Hall D	Opening Keynote and Welcome Address with John Chambers
12:00 PM-2:00 PM	BRKAPP-2011 Moscone W2016	Application and Data Delivery Performance in a Low Latency 10GE Environment
2:30 PM-3:30 PM	GENSSN-4462 Hall D	NetQoS Super Session, NBC Universal’s Olympic Gold Network Performance!
4:00 PM-6:00 PM	BRKRST-3365 Moscone W2024	Unified HA Network Design: The Evolution of the Next Generation Network
7:00 PM-10:00 PM	Partner event – Red Devil Lounge CCIE Party – Science Center – Pick the one with the best bar.	Partner event – Red Devil Lounge CCIE Party – Science Center – Pick the one with the best bar.

Wednesday
8:00 AM-10:00 AM	BRKSAN-3707 Moscone W2000	Advanced SAN Services
10:30 AM-11:30 AM (Conference Event)	GENKEY-5564 Hall D	Cisco Technology Keynote with Padmasree Warrior
12:00 PM-2:00 PM	BRKOPT-2115 Moscone N122	IPoDWDM: 40G, 100G, and Beyond
2:30 PM-3:30 PM	GENSSN-4463 Moscone N135	Super Session: Building the Collaboration Extranet
4:00 PM-6:00 PM	BRKRST-3101 Moscone W2002	Advanced Topics and Future Directions in MPLS
7:30 PM-11:30 PM	Customer Event Social Events	Customer Appreciation Event

Thursday
8:00 AM-10:00 AM	BRKRST-3305 Moscone W2022	Advanced IPv6 Deployment and Services
10:30 AM-11:30 AM (Conference Event)	GENKEY-5565 Hall D	Closing Guest Keynote: Guy Kawasaki
12:00 PM-2:00 PM	BRKDCT-2981 Moscone W2005	L2MP overview: going beyond the spanning tree protocol [ Related Technology Demo: Nexus 1000V Data Center Virtual Switching ]
2:30 PM-4:30 PM	BRKNMS-3132 Moscone W2008	Advanced NetFlow

Similar Posts:

• I’ll be at Cisco Live 2008 (networkers) in Orlando all week
• CCIE Party 2008 Recap – Cisco Live Networkers 2008
• Heading home – Cisco Live 2008
• No one told me there would be a monsoon – Cisco Live Networkers 2008
• Why was Storage Networking my first CCIE? And What did I do to prepare?
• Application Extension API notes – Cisco Live 2008

--Colin McNamara

Cisco Live 2009 – Networkers class schedule

“it looks like one of the key features not on the list of components for the California boxes is going to be a red discount pen”

Timothy references sources who have obtained a price list and shared it with “El Reg” . I wish Timothy would have contacted an actual Cisco Unified Computing System Advanced Technology Partner, because any partner that is involved in the launch could have explained to him the concepts of List price (List), Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price (MSRP), and Purchase or Buy price.

In this article I want to dispel the myths of server and network manufacturer pricing, demonstrate the true cost of building a data center with blade systems, and at the end provide a cost comparison between legacy server vendors options and Cisco’s Unified Compute System.

First, lets go over some the basic concepts of vendor pricing. At the end of this you should understand the difference between list price, manufacturers suggested retail price, and purchase price.

List Price

List price is a high level number that Cisco publishes weekly in its global price list. The purpose of this list price is to provide a uniform price list across all product sets that Cisco offers. The most important thing about list price is NOBODY EVER PAYS LIST PRICE. Let me repeat that again NOBODY EVER PAYS LIST PRICE. Are we clear? This is similar to list price on a car on the car lot. All list price provides is a starting point where a Cisco partner and a customer can negotiate a common discount and end up with something close to (generally at or below depending on technology type and yearly spend) MSRP.

Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price (MSRP)

This concept is something that anyone who has purchased a car before is familiar with. The number that is on the window of the car when you look on the lot is list price. The first number the dealer brings up lower then sticker is MSRP. Depending on the popular of the product, the competition in that particular space, and the negotiating power of the customer you will either pay that price, or some percentage below. For example if you are buying one new car you may have the negotiating power to get the price to drop 5% off of list. If you are buying 200 new cars (say a fleet) you have significantly higher negotiating power, and you may be able to drop the price by 15% of of list price.

In Networking Sales MSRP is significantly less then list price. A good exercise to see what this number is, is to find a device, say a WS-C3560E-12SD-E (3560 with 12 Gig SFP ports and 2 10 Gig ports) in the Global Price List. You have access to this at any partner level at www.cisco.com/dprg . (my point here is that this is no big secret). As of Friday June 12 2009 the LIST price for this product is $19,995.

Now take that same part number - WS-C3560E-12SD-E and pop it into your google search window. Within the top four links I found this product for $12,434.15 . This price is for  pure fulfillment, with no value added consulting or design work from you local Cisco partner.

If you do the quick math, this price difference is equal to 38% off of list price. Come to your own conclusions, but it would be safe to say that this could be considered MSRP for Cisco products.

Purchase / Buy Price

Buy price is just that, the price at which the customer purchases (buys) the product. This is can be at MSRP, or if the customer is buying significant amounts of hardware at a time, or if there is a “special” (programs and incentives) going on the number could be slightly lower then MSRP.

Percent off of list differences between legacy server vendors and networking vendors

This is where the biggest confusion is coming from. Legacy server manufacturers  have set their list prices much closer to MSRP then networking vendors (remember, MSRP is the price where most customers purchase at).

Why is this? In the networking space, vendors have historically created their own processors, ASICS and boards. This means that the sales discussions are feature to feature. It also meant that you had to have a conversation with the networking vendor or networking partner to properly size your network devices and get a quote – which is around MSRP, not List price.

In the legacy server space, especially the majority of the x86 server space, the market has been essentially commoditized. E.G. – You can buy an intel based server with X amount of memory and hard drives that will perform roughly equally from any of the main manufacturers. That made it much easier for a sever admin to just pull a price off of the web and compare. So what the server vendors ended up doing is setting their list price  only slightly above MSRP.

What this translates to is the list price, between legacy compute vendors and Cisco will be drastically unequal. What is equal is MSRP, or the generally accepted purchase price by common customers.

Why did Cisco set the list price of UCS higher then the legacy server manufacturers?

For the vast majority of its sales, Cisco relies on what is called the channel model. This means that Cisco partners with local Value Added Resellers (VAR’s) who sell Cisco’s products and then provide consultative services to design and implement them in customer networks. Most customers who purchase any regular amount of Cisco product either have a general expectation that they will buy Cisco product at a certain percentage discount off of list and sometimes the partner and customer have entered into purchasing contracts which require that all Cisco product is provided at a specific discount off of list price.

If Cisco decided to set the List price at a small percentage lift over MSRP, this would cause a problem for the entire channel. This would be especially hard for any customer who had a contract to buy product at a specific discount. What would happen is contracts would have to be renegotiated, which generally takes months and is about as fun as pulling teeth.

The second reason for setting list price the for compute the same as list for network is quoting. Right now, if you buy hundreds of different Cisco devices through a reseller it is very likely that the discount is going to be the same across all products. This makes the mechanics of sales much simpler, because you don’t have a lot of math in the quote (this can cause errors). On the customer side, having one set discount makes it much easier to compare quotes and to ensure that they are getting the best deal possible. In short, sticking with Cisco’s current list pricing structure benefits both the customer and the partner.

Now that we have set the record straight on list price, MSRP, and Buy price, lets take a deeper dive into what components make up a blade system powered data center. And then we will compare the price structures of both.

Components of all Blade Systems

Blade Server – The compute blade where commodity silicon elements such as the CPU and RAM are housed. As of writing this article, the latest high performance blades from all major server manufactures support two xeon 5500 processors (Nehalem) and DDR3 memory.

Mezzanine cards – These cards take the place of PCI-e cards in a rack form factor server. In a blade system these provide data network and storage network connectivity. They attach to the blade itself via proprietary connectors that implement either PCI-e 8 or 16 lane connectivity at the time of writing. In some cases other functions such as IO accelerators can also be attached in the mezzanine card form factor.

Blade Enclosure – This is functionally a tin can where eight to sixteen blades are placed. It also is used to provide a centralized power distribution fabric, as wells as slots for interconnections of data and storage network devices.

Data Network Modules – These are effectively ethernet switches that have been miniaturized to fit into the tight confines of a blade enclosure. Classically they have provided 1 gig connectivity to the servers, and 10 gig to the distribution layer, however with Nehalem processors and VMware there is a move towards presenting 10 gig connections to the server, and multiple 10 Gig connections into the distribution layer.

Storage Network Modules – The local disk in a blade server is classically anemic. To provide higher IOPS (input outputs per second) to disk, Fibre Channel connectivity is extended by taking SAN fabric switches and miniaturizing them to fit into the blade enclosure.

Data Network Distribution – If you have multiple blade enclosures there is a need to connect them together at a reasonably high bandwidth. To serve that need a variety of 10 Gig distribution switches are provided from all server manufactures at varying cost and performance levels.

Storage Network Distribution – Along the same lines of the data network distribution, SAN fabric switches have to aggregate up to a SAN distribution layer, or if the installation is reasonably large a “director” class SAN switch. This allows all the blade enclosures to see the same storage network, as well as providing for deterministic storage network performance as you scale out.

Management Infrastructure – All manufactures have a need to manage and monitor all of the devices that comprise their blade system. Many manufactures have multiple management modules per blade enclosure.

Comparison of Costs – Cisco vs Legacy Server Manufacturers

The funny thing, is that many people have assumed that Cisco’s Unified Computing System will be priced higher then legacy server manufactures products. In my mind this is because they associate higher quality with higher price (basically the Mercedes vs Kia discussion). Here is something that will shock you - it costs less to buy an entire blade system through Cisco then to buy from the legacy server manufacturers.

When people hear this, they are puzzled. How can two server manufacturers, who buy their CPU’s from the same company (Intel) and their memory from the same fabs end up with different prices? The answer is elegance in engineering. Lets go through each of the elements of a blade system infrastructure and find out where the costs are. More importantly lets look at where Cisco has innovated to provide higher performance at a lower cost.

Dollars and Cents – How much is the cost difference

I worked up two quotes recently. These quotes included all elements required to build an end to end blade system using both legacy server manufactures devices, and using Cisco’s Unified Computing System. I have broken out two scenarios.

8 blade servers - Cisco wins with a savings of 11%

In this scenario the cost of servers and enclosures were fairly equal. The cost savings started racking up as storage and data networking devices were included, as well as base management software was taken into consideration.

320 blade servers - Cisco wins with a savings of 31%

With 32o blade servers the same cost savings seen in the 8 server scenario were amplified. Economies of scale translated into significantly less devices being required to support the individual compute blades. This resulted in 31% savings compared to the legacy server manufacturers.

Summing it up

Cisco has entered into a highly competitive server market by taking an elegant approach to its blade systems. This approach lowers the purchase price of the UCS through reducing the amount of components compared to legacy server manufacturers. I know that there is a lot of misinformation flying around, and I hope this helps to set the record straight on the pricing of Cisco’s Unified Computing System.Similar Posts:

• Cisco Nexus 4000 Blade Switch
• Simplifying your Data Center with Cisco’s Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender (FEX)
• Cisco introduces the C-Series Rack Servers
• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel
• Is your network ready for Cloud Computing with Virtual Infrastructure 4?
• Cisco Nexus 5010 released

--Colin McNamara

Confusion about Cisco UCS pricing – Setting the Record Straight

The Server Landscape

If you take a look at most enterprise and commercial customers data centers, you will notice a trend of larger fixed workloads running on two rack unit servers (very commonly HP’s DL380), and newer virtualization workloads consolidated onto blade center form factor servers (commonly c7000 class blade systems, and soon Cisco UCS B-Series blades).

However when you go to a remote site where the compute needs are much smaller, you tend to see a few 1 and 2 rack unit system (DL360 or DL380). Why is this? There are a couple reasons, but the most pressing reason is cost. In a blade system, even if you virtualize there is a tipping point where it costs less to install blades and use centralized storage then it costs to use rack form factor servers with local storage. I find that tipping point is generally between five and 8 blades.

If you are a small remote site, or small to medium size business you may not have the compute needs (especially with virtualization) to push you over that tipping point into the blade center form factor. In that case, a few rack optimized servers provide the optimal return on investment for that smaller site.

Taking a closer look at Cisco’s C-Series Servers

Cisco UCS C 200 M1 -

Effectively this is a clone of the B-200 M1 blade in the B series UCS chassis with the addition of two PCIe slots and two more SFF SAS/SATA drives..

The C 200 M1 is a 1 rack unit form factor server (pizza box). It supports a dual port 10 gigabit converged network adapter. two Xeon 5500 series processors, four small form factor SAS drives, 12 dimms for a total of 96 Gigabytes of memory.

Cisco UCS C 210 M1 -

The C 210 is a 2 rack unit form factor server, with the same CPU and memory architecture as the C 200. What has been added is 3 additional PCIe slots (for a total of 5). There is also support for up to 16 SFF SAS/SATA drives.

Out of all the C-Series servers I think this will be the most popular. The extra local disk and PCIe slots will be extremely tempting. For example if this server was populated with 750 Gig SFF SATA drives and augmented with some Fusion-io cards you could have 6 Terabytes of raw disk inside this server. An end user could install Open Filer or iSCSI Enterprise Target and have a pretty respectable NAS head. The other possibility is someone will notice that the Palo adapter can be used as a FCoE target, and use a couple of these as backends for FC storage. (This FC target functionality is mentioned in Silvano Gai’s book).

Cisco UCS C 250 M1 -

Effectively this is a clone of the B-250 M1 blade in the B series UCS chassis with the addition of five PCIe slots and eight SFF SAS/SATA drives.

The C 250 M1 is a 2 rack unit form factor server. It supports a dual port 10 gigabit converged network adapters. two Xeon 5500 series processors, eight small form factor SAS/SATA drives, and 48 dimms for a total of 384 Gigabytes of memory.

This server utilizes the same catalina chipset for memory expansion that it’s cousing the B-250 M1 utilizes.  The ability to aggregate low cost memory plus the PCIe slots to insert solid state I/O acceleration make this a prime candidate to business intelligence / data warehousing workloads as well as Electronic Design Automation.

When can I buy these?

Putting any new product line into production is a monumental effort that many of us take for granted. My gut feel is that Cisco will focus on satisfying demand for the B Series Unified Compute System first, and once manufacturing has hit their stride with the UCS Cisco will start production of the C-Series. In short, I’m  expecting the first C-Series servers to roll off the line at the end of 2009, and  meaningful availability of the C-Series in the first quarter of calendar year 2010.

How do I integrate these into my network?

This is a question that is bound to come up. Cisco’s C-Series servers can integrate directly into your 10 Gig enabled network. Now, to get the best bang for your buck, you should ideally connect these into a pair of Nexus 5000′s to converge your storage and data networks into simple 10 Gig Data Center Ethernet links.

You may however have site without 10 gig enabled switches. In that case, there are multiple PCIe slots in these servers so we should be free to utilize 10/100/1000 adapters. Then when these sites have the need to move to 10 Gig, the server will be capable of supporting that level of connectivity.

My Perspective

At the end of the day, Cisco is now a server manufacture. Just like the HP and IBM, Cisco has to provide platforms that meet customer needs. While the B-Series Unified Computing System is an outstanding platform, it shares similar entry costs that other blade systems have (the need to purchase chassis and interconnects first) which can server as a barrier for smaller server installations. By introducing a 19″ rack form factor line of servers that share many of the I/O and memory benefits of the B-Series servers, Cisco is directly answering the needs it’s customer base by providing a form factor that can scale across all size of customer installation.

Want to learn more?

Cisco Unified Computing System Overview – colinmcnamara.com

UCS C-Series Rack Servers: A New Path to Unified Computing – Cisco.com

Cisco unveils rackmount servers for UCS - datacenterknowledge.comSimilar Posts:

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• Cisco Nexus 5010 released
• Usability features in Cisco’s Nexus 7000

--Colin McNamara

Cisco introduces the C-Series Rack Servers

Why do I say that? It is simple, every server that moves from a corporate data center into a cloud provider is a switchport and fibre channel port (and now server) that is not purchased from Cisco. More so, each system that is moved into the cloud hurts secondary sales of security and content switching products.

The promise of enterprise cloud computing

The ability to dynamically scale enterprise compute workloads while only running a “right sized” private infrastructure is top of every CIO’s mind. This is the promise of cloud computing in the enterprise space. However, right now most cloud offerings are too new, and lack the critical integrations with VMware or XenSource (the two most common enterprise virtualization platforms) to make a serious dent in Cisco’s revenue stream. But fast forward 12 to 16 months and the kinks will be worked out. Projects that would previously have required new capital infrastructure will be restructured to use cloud providers as an operational expense. This will present a real threat to Cisco’s revenue moving forward.

John Chambers and his team of technologist are not new to this game, this is not the first threat to Cisco’s sales model. And I am sure that it won’t be the last. So if I was in their shoes, what would I do? (and more specifically, what do I think they are doing)

Create a compute platform that can power the cloud at a much lower cost that my competitors

Cisco publicly announced their computing offering, the Unified Computing System in March of this year. The promise of the UCS is to minimize power, cooling, capital costs and management overhead of data center compute. Looking at this new product line from an enterprise sales perspective it makes sence. For Cisco to continue with their growth plans they had to choose to enter the Compute or Storage markets, with the compute (server) market being the logical step.

While the Unified Computing System is well placed as an enterprise computing platform, I think there is a larger goal in mind. The large goal is to make a platform that can be shared by Cisco’s largest enterprise clients in their emerging private clouds, as well as by Cisco itself for it’s own cloud offering. By producing their own servers, with technology that Cisco alone has access too (memory expansion / hypervisor bypass) Cisco sets themselves up to have both lower hardware costs in their own cloud, as well as lower operational costs (power/cooling). This will provide Cisco with higher margin at the same price point as their competitors.

Distribute application aware network devices at customer locations

Cisco already has a significant edge over any competitive cloud offering. A vast majority of enterprise customers already run Cisco routers, switches and firewalls. If Cisco decided to say, port the TCP optimization code from their WAN acceleration platform into IOS, and configure it to work with their own cloud offerings this would give them an immediate leg up on the competition. Combine this with the existing WAAS auto discovery and Cisco could conceivably automatically integrate a cloud based caching offering with a customer’s onsite devices.

Create an application centric cloud security model that can be integrated with virtualization platforms

Last year Cisco announced a new approach to security called Cisco TrustSec. This technology includes a change from layer 4 based acl’s to an application focused role based implementation. This is applicable in the cloud environment because it provides a standard integration for controlling the access to and mobility of applications as they travel between public and private clouds.

An interesting side bar, is the fact that when integrating public and private clouds, there will always be applications that you want to keep on your internal cloud. The easiest way to do this is to put some sort of meta information on the virtual server containing a flag that this server should only run on the private cloud. With VMware there are fields that are used for DRS that can house just such data. I would not be surprised that with all the work that Cisco and VMware have been doing together if this was not implemented with vSphere (Virtual Infrastructure 4).

Learn as an organization how to profit from a SaaS model

I think this last piece of the puzzle has been overlooked by many people. Cisco already has in house experience dealing with a massive Software as a Service (SaaS) offering – Cisco WebEx. In acquiring WebEx Cisco also acquired the talent and technology behind the worlds largest collaboration platform. Cisco should be able to take the lessons learned from running and improving this platform, and apply them to their upcoming cloud offering.

Summary

Cisco has to go to market with a Cloud offering to maintain long term viability as a company. When they do they will have the benefit of lower cost of building and operating the grids that their cloud offering will run on. They will be able to leverage millions of Cisco network devices in their current install base as well as provide application centric security integrated with these same devices. And most importantly they will be able to use the lessons learned from running WebEx to ensure flawless delivery of an upcoming cloud computing offering.Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Cisco’s Cloud Computing Offering

Brian Schwarz (SAVBU) and I were guests, and had the chance to talk about Cisco’s Unified Computing offering. It was my first time doing a podcast, and I have to say it was a blast.

If you can spare the time, I recommend you check out it -

Cisco Interactive Network – Unified Computing PodcastSimilar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Unified Computing Podcast with Cisco Interactive Network

This March, Cisco formally announced its entry into the enterprise computing market with a new product line called the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). I say formally announced, becase the existence of the Unified Computing System might just be the worst kept secret in history. In the months prior, to launch Cisco has been openly talking about the system, as well as many news agencies. The only people who haven’t been talking about the system were those of us who got briefed in early and were under strict NDA. (yours truly being one of them). But now, the multiple layers of NDA have been removed and I am free to talk. So, let me tell you about a new concept called Unified Computing.

The Unified Computing System answers a simple question – “what would you do if you could build a system with no preconceptions”. That same question has been asked over the years by Cisco. The results have given us the Catalyst 6500 line of switches, the Cisco MDS storage line, as well as the Nexus 7000/5000/2000/1000V family of switches.

Nuova – a history of innovation

A couple of years ago, Cisco funded a startup called Nuova (meaning “New” in Italian). The founders of this startup were the same innovators who led the Catalyst, MDS and Nexus products. Not only did they have a track record of successful products, but they also had experience in both types of Data Center networking – Ethernet, and Fibre Channel. This startup took the lessons they learned creating a non blocking, low latency, highly available fabric for the MDS line of SAN switches and created a new line of Data Center switches, the Nexus 5000 that is able to transport Fibre Channel and Ethernet traffic at the same time, through a single adapter.

In April of 2008 Cisco formally acquired Nuova (which in effect was just hiring prior innovators back). Nuova was renamed the Server and Virtualization Business Unit (SAVBU), and the Nexus 5000 was released to market, making Cisco the first vendor to deliver a solution based around the upcoming Fibre Channel over Ethernet standard (FCOE). This pattern of innovation continued, as SAVBU released a virtual switch for VMware (the nexus 1000V) and this January released a remote line card technology called Fabric Extension. Those of us on the inside got the hint that the choice of names for this new business unit (SERVER and VIRTUALIZATION Business Unit) was a foreshadow of things to come.

Unified Computing System enclosure w/ redundant 6120 Fabric Interconnects

Here are some spec’s to get you started –

• Single point of management for all devices in the fabric.
• Virtual machine enabled networks adapters. (VNtag capable)
• Up to 320 B-series compute blades in one fabric.
• Up to 384 Gigabytes of memory per blade (full width blade)
• Server Profiles – virtualize server identities (UUID, WWN, MAC)
• Hardware Assisted Virtualization using Intel’s next generation Xeon (code named Nehalem-EP) processors
• Redundant 10 Gigabit connections between servers.
• Fibre Channel SAN access available to every blade.
• Capital costs up to 20% less
• Operational costs up to 30% less

The UCS does all of this while using 1/3 less components then the competition. What does using less components give you? Less components means less things to buy (lower capital expense). It also means less things to power and cool (lower operational expens). And finally it means less items to manage (lower management burden) How does Cisco do all of this while using drastically fewer components? I think it is necessary to talk about the major components that they system is built from to answer that question.

Cisco UCS 6100 Fabric Interconnect (Nexus 5000 on steroids)

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The primary building block of the system is the Cisco UCS 6100 Fabric Interconnect. Cisco took the non blocking, low latency, lossless fabric from the MDS that was used on the Nexus 5000 and used it as a building block for the 6120 and 6140 Fabric Interconnects. These fabrics support 20 and 40 (6120/6140)10gig Data Center Ethernet (combined Fibre Channel and Ethernet support).

• 6120 – 20 Fixed 10 Gig Data Center Ethernet ports along with an expansion module that supports native Fibre Channel, or additional Data Center Ethernet interfaces
• 6120 – 40 Fixed 10 Gig Data Center Ethernet ports along with two expansion module that supports native Fibre Channel, or additional Data Center Ethernet interfaces

The 6100 series Fabric Interconnect unifies Storage and Ethernet network, as well as providing supervisory functions for its remote line cards, the 2100 series fabric extenders that are inserted the compute chassis. The other thing the 6100 Fabric Interconnect does is house the Unified Computing System Manager (UCSM).

Cisco Unified Computing System Manager (UCSM)

The UCSM runs on the fabric switches, providing a single point of management for all components in the fabric -

• I/O Fabric
• Chassis and Services
• Adapters and Virtual I/O

This interface can be accessed through either a web based Gui or CLI. It also supports a full API for programatic integration and management of the system. The biggest thing that they SAM gives you is the ability to dynamically provision server attributes down to the compute blades. Attributes that can be pushed down dynamically include CPU UUID, SAN PWWN, Ethernet MAC address, and many more. These items are pushed down through as Service Profiles.One key component of the service profile is the Port Profile.

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These Port Profiles are dynamically created in the SAM, and most importantly enable you to create virtual network interfaces (vNics) that show up to your server administrators as normal network interfaces. This allows your server administrators to follow their application vendors recommended interconnection topologies.

A great example would be VMware’s recommended topology for ESX. In this topology there are four network intefaces defined. Each for a specific function. This logical topology can be implemented, with all the relevant speed, QOS, VLAN, and security attributes all “pre-configured” for the virtulization administrators, simplifying their virtualization cluster deployments.

Cisco UCS 2100 Fabric Extender (Next Generation FEX)

 The next component in this architecture is the UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extender (FEX). There are two of these in each bladechassis. Each FEX has the capability of up-linking to 6100 Fabric Interconnects with four 10 Gig ports. for a total of 80 Gigabit persecond out of each blade chassis (supporting 8 half width blades, or 4 full width blades). Each FEX is managed as a “remote line card” connected off of the Fabric Interconnects.

Logically, think of your 6500 series switch in your Data Center right now. You have three logical functions, supervisory functions (sup module), a bus for the switching fabric (traces in the chassis) and line cards (6748 for example). You will notice that you only manage the sup module itself. You don’t shell into to each line card to set up backplane interconnects, or to update microcode. You update software and configurations on the sup module, and the intelligence that Cisco builds into its software manages this for you.

The 6100 and the 2100 interact in the exact same way. In this case the 6100′s are the sup modules, the 2100′s are the line cards, and we are running 10 Gig connections to build the switching fabric. What this gives you is a simplified network architecture, which takes elements that would in the past be individually managed, maintained, upgraded, etc and consolidates that into one highly available, high bandwidth consolidated SAN and Ethernet for your Data Center compute needs.

Putting Network Intelligence on the Compute Blade

Cisco will be giving customers three mezzanine card network adapters options for the UCS.

The first card (based is based on a the Palo chipset. This chipset was developed internally at Cisco and performs Network, Storage and Virtual Machine networking functions all on one 10 Gig capable chip. This chipset effectively extends network intelligence into the blade itself allowing for some pretty interesting integrations with Virtual Machine Hypevervisors (VMware, Hyper-V, Etc).

The second option is based on the Menlo chipset in conjunction with either a Qlogic or Emulex Fibre Channel adapter chipset that gives you 10 Gig network access, while retaining strict compatability with applications that require either of these classic HBA’s.

The third option is an “economy” option based on an Intel chipset. This will give the compute blade 10 Gig access.

What will drive your choice of network adapter? I think the biggest driver will be a technology called “VNtag”. This technology is currently in use on the FEX to encapsulate traffic that enters the fabric with a little shim header that communicates the identity of the incoming port (VLAN, QOS, Security info, etc). This shim header passes from the FEX up to the 6100 where the shim header is removed and the frame is processed.

This alone is very cool, however Cisco has taken things one step further and put the ability to impose VNtag’s in the Palo chipset (on the blade) itself. What this gives you the ability to logically attach a virtual machine DIRECTLY to the network. We no longer need a vSwitch, or even a 1000V to give full network functionality to a virtual machine. Effectively, Cisco is giving the network adapter inside of the blade many of the functions of a network switchport. Logically what this does is reduce your network tiers from four tiers in a competitive system, to two tiers in a Unified Computing System.

Cisco UCS B-Series Blades

The compute blades themselves are available in either 1/2 width of full width form factors. As stated in the formal announcement the maximum memory for a full width blade will be 384 Gigabytes per blade. Why is this important?

At release, there will be two option for compute blades.

Half width blade

• 2 quad core Intel Xeon 5500 processors
• 96 Gigabytes of memory
• Two small form factor SAS drives (raid 0 and 1)
• Single Converged Network Adapter slot (connected to redundant fabrics)

Full width blade

• 2 quad core Intel Xeon 5500 processors
• 384 Gigabytes of memory
• Two small form factor SAS drives (raid 0 and 1)
• Dual Converged Network Adapter slots

As CPU’s become more powerful, the host compression ratio’s (the amount of virtual machines you run on one physical blade) increases. The one thing is, you can only over commit your memory to a point. Once you are at that point you have to physically add more memory. Your only option with legacy server architectures is to add another physical server, pay for additional licenses and add more memory to it. Then add that server to the cluster and allow your virtual machines to utilize its additional resources in the pool.

The problem with this is a simple one, Cost. The problem was that the virtual machines needed more memory, but since there was a limitation on how much memory the legacy server could handle, it forces costs skyward to meet those memory needs. In this scenario if the customer had been using a full width Unified Computing blade the customer could have avoided purchasing an additional server and avoided the additional licensing and management cost associated with that additional server.

What does this balance out to in real costs? By allowing for higher host compression ratios there is the capability to avoid a significant amount of cost (50%+) in your compute layer. 

Intel Xeon 5500 ( Code Named Nehalem-EP)

Intel’s next generation Xeon CPU (code named Nehalem) will be driving the Compute Blades. The Xeon 5500 signals Intel’s move away from the legacy “Front Side Bus” (FSB) architecture into what is called “Intel Quick Path Interconnect” (QPI). Intel’s Xeon 5500 with Quick Path Interconnect changes a couple key things from previous generation Xeon procesors.

• high bandwidth, full mesh, routed interconnect between CPU’s instead of a low bandwidth bus
• DDR3 vs DDR2 memory and moves the memory bank adjacent to the CPU’s for higher performance
• I/O Hubs are now dedicated for network and storage interconnects

First and Second Gen Xeon vs Xeon 5500 (Nehalem)

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If you look at the picture above, where the last generation processors are to the left, and the processor that will be in the UCS is on the right, you will notice a couple key items. I think the most important items to point out is that the bandwidth in pretty much all directions is superior in this architecture. If you think about this as a network on your server itself, you can see how moving from a bus based network, to a full mesh routed network has significant performance advantages. Stay tuned for later posts where I will talk about some of these advantages in detail.

Hardware Assisted Virtualization

One of most important new features that Intel is bringing to the table is the notion of hardware assisted virtualization. Intel has created a couple key technologies to address the following problems faced in virtual environments.

Processor Virtualization

Currently to virtualize an operating system, we rely on the hypervisor (ESX, for example) to accomplish two key tasks – Ring Depriveleging and Context Switching. When we are talking about CPU overhead in virtual environments this is what we are talking about.

Memory Virtualization

Again, in current environments the hypervisor is used to abstract memory. ESX uses a technique called page table shadowing to virtualize the physical memory. This again however adds inefficiency to the process and shows up as virtualization overhead.

I/O Device Virtualization

As our virtual machines go to disk, we are again presented with a situation where the hypervisor has to abstract disks and networks presented tot he physical server, and connect these to the relevant virtual machines. Again, this shows up as virtualization overhead, lowering the efficiency of our virtual servers as well as introducing I/O sprawl.

Solving virtualization overhead problems

With the Xeon 5500 on Cisco’s Unified Compute System blade you will be able to use processor features to solve the problems listed above. VT-X is used to extend CPU virtualization down to the physical CPU, Extended Page Tables, Cisco Memory Expansion and DMA remapping is used to speed remove memory access overhead from virtual network and I/O interfaces, and I/O devices sharing through VT-C is used to integrate the physical network with the virtual network transparently and with much less overhead.

Summary

Cisco’s entry into the computing space is not a “me too” entry into a commodity x86 market. It is a well thought out strategic move unifying storage, network and compute functions in a unique way that will differentiate the Unified Computing System from other compute offerings. I expect some fierce debate of the upcoming months as competitors release products to compete. I feel that Cisco’s value proposition of a unified compute / network layer in the Data Center uniquely solves problems that most customers face. And at the end of the day, the vendor that can solve the customers problems is the vendor that will succede.
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--Colin McNamara

Cisco’s Unified Computing System – It’s not just a blade center

What is a Fabric Extender?

If you think of a large switching chassis such as a Catalyst 6500 or Nexus 7000 you have the notion of a Supervisory module, a switching fabric forming the backplane, and line cards connected on the back into the fabric, and connecting to servers and other networking devices in the front. In the case of these switching chassis all of the items we just talked about are connected on the inside of the same physical box. Now suppose we took each of those components, the Sup, Fabric, and Line Card and installed them in different parts of your data center. The Sup module in this case would be a Nexus 5020 or Nexus 5010. The fabric would be four 10 Gig port bundles from the Nexus to the Fabric Extender, and the line cards themselves would be replaced by the Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender.

Why use a Nexus Fabric Extension in your Data Center designs?

1. Simplify network management – By moving from individualy managed standalone edge switches to an extended fabric you minimize the amount of devices in your datacenter that you have to manage. Say you have 10 racks full of pizza box servers, (That makes 42 servers per rack) you may throw 3750′s or 4948′s top of rack to provide connectivity. In this case your access layer would consist of at minimum 10 unique devices to manage, upgrade, etc. in your server access layer. If instead you put a Fabric Extender at the top of each rack, you still get 48 ports of coppert gigabit ethernet, but logically you would only have 1 device to manage.

2. Simplify your network topology – In the scenarios mentioned above with classic switching, you would have to manage a spanning tree topology accross your entire access layer. Half of your uplinks will be blocked by spanning tree so your network does not loop. This is a perfectly valid topology, but it does leave you open to the pains of spanning tree in your data center Now replace these switches with a Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender. Instead of spanning tree to integrating individual switches, you now how a very simple U topology forming your edge.

3. Lower your costs for Data Center class switching – Before the Nexus 2000 if you wanted to properly deploy a Data Center access layer, you either had to do buy 6748 blade on a 6500, a 48 port gig blade on a Nexus 7k (M148GT) , ora 3750 or 4948 switch. These all are not the cheapest switches and blades, but they provide each gig switch port with the proper buffers and throughput that are needed for true Data Center applications. Now if we chose to use the Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender in conjunction with the Nexus 5000 we can provide Data Center class 1 Gig Ethernet services at roughly half the cost of using the older switches.

4. Integrate 10 gig and 1 Gig services in a clean way – I have seen many many clients try to cleanly integrate 10 Gig services (normally from blade centers w/ ESX clusters) into an existing 1 gig data center edge. Normally what happens is that the “best” integration case is to put some form of oversubscribed 10 Gig card into their existing distribution layer, or in a worst case some customers are only able to provide 10 Gig of a collapsed core. This is obviously not an ideal setup. By integrating the Nexus 5000 40 or 20 port 10 Gig switches with the Nexus 2000 Fabric extender it provides us with a very clean way to integrate both 10 Gig and 1 Gig services in our Data Center access layer.

Why am I excited about this product?

I am lucky enough to work with some forwarding thinking customers with very large Data Center requirements. We have been working with Cisco over the past couple months to incorporate this end to end Nexus infrastructure into multiple customer designs. Before the Nexus  5000 / 2000 combination, designs to provide large layer 2 adjacent mixed 10 and 1 Gig services were well…. not as elegant as we would have liked to see. Now with Fabric Extension, we  are able to answer this mixed 10 / 1 Gig Data Center access layer design scenario in an elegant and scalable way.

Want to learn more?

Nexus 2148T Product Page - Cisco.com
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--Colin McNamara

Simplifying your Data Center with Cisco’s Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender (FEX)

Most engineers in the channel utilize a tool called the Dynamic Configuration Tool. This allows you to take a product, configure it with all of its software, hardware and licensing options, give it a sanity check and then output a spreadsheet. You then take spreadsheet and combine it with the other hardware in your design to create what is called a Bill of Materials (commonly referred to as a BOM). The challenge here is if you only use the Dynamic Configuration Tool, you will not see the storage specific options for the Nexus family of Data Center switches.

The solution is to use a tool called the Multi-line Configurator. In the video below, I will show you how to use this tool to create a working Nexus 5000 BOM for your customers. (for fullscreen hover your mouse over the video and click on the “X” next to the vimeo link.)

Normally I don’t discuss channel specific topics on this blog, but my fear is that other engineers in the channel may fumble when creating BOM’s around Nexus, and otherwise tarnish a really good product. Since channel specific topics is new to this blog, it would help me out if you could ping me if you found this useful. Depending on the response I receive I will start sprinkling in more of channel partner specific content in the future.
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--Colin McNamara

Cisco Nexus 5020 and 5010 FCOE video ordering guide

The coolest thing about this chassis is its price. You can get 20 ports of line rate lossless frabric 10 Gig cheap (about 850 a port list price). At that price point, putting one of these top of rack starts to look very enticing to many people.

Want to learn more?

Cisco Nexus 5010Similar Posts:

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• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel
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• Breaking the 200 nanosecond barrier with Algo Boost on the Nexus 3548

--Colin McNamara

Cisco Nexus 5010 released

It is truly my pleasure and honor to join Arista Networks as the President and CEO of the company. I have known founders, Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton for a decade and worked with them closely during their Granite/Cisco days. To me, Arista is a symbol of an exciting, innovative silicon valley start-up company at the brink of pioneering new models for cloud networking.

After corporate life and managing multibillion dollars of business at Cisco Systems, you might ask why I chose Arista Networks? Three things really drew me here:

1. A top-notch and talented team, with focus on best of breed products and innovative EOS™ (Extensible Operating System) technology.
2. Working with Andy Bechtolsheim, and our long-standing 20+ year professional kinship.
3. A truly unique opportunity in our industry to build and grow into a great company!

Inside of Cisco Jayshree proved herself as a leader that could get results. There was even speculation that she was tagged to be John Chambers eventual replacement. I have a feeling the same qualities that drove her success inside of Cisco will follow her as she explores this new opportunity.Similar Posts:

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• Arista Networks – Their approach to cloud networking
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--Colin McNamara

Jayshree Ullal takes the helm of Arista Networks

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--Colin McNamara

My Twitter tweets this week

First and foremost it is important to discuss how many networks are right now (click for larger images)

Figure 1.1

This is a pretty common setup, with 80% of so of systems still physically attached to a mix of 100 and 1000 Megabit access layer switches. The other 20% of virtual systems are attached as through blade center switches with 10 gig to distribution or larger (8-16 core) systems with bundled uplinks to the distribution switches. Service aggregation such as firewall, load balancing, and wan acceleration , image deployment, monitoring / management and other key Data Center services generally provisioned off 1000 Megabit ports in the distribution.

Last but not least, a shadow storage network runs connected to a small percentage of physical servers, and connected to all of the virtual servers via Fiber Channel, iSCSI, or NFS presentation. One thing to keep in mind that all of these elements may not be configured in the “optimal” SRND setup, but it is something that you can expect to see in a real life network today.

What’s so special about Vi4 Application vServices ?

Figure 1.2

The one new feature that is going to throw your network on its heels is vApp. Imagine if any application could be installed on any server in any location of your network at any time. What vApp enables you to do is create a portable application, similar to a Java application that installs in your web browser. But this application can be dynamically deployed to any virtual system in your Data Center as needed in response to a new application request, or the need to dynamically scale an application. What this means to us as network engineers is that any corner of our networks where virtualization is present can become a hot spot for critical application flows. This introduces a new dynamism to our fabrics which wasn’t there before, and frankly many networks are not equiped to handle it successfully.

Currently, to provide virtual machine redundancy we have VMware HA, where we both monitor the availability of a virtual machine. If there is a problem we can restart that virtual machine on another ESX host. With Application vServices there are many new elements and traffic flows. The two most important ones are vLockstop and vCenter Data Recovery. VMware is taking high availability to the next level by keeping a hot standby VM running on a second physical ESX server. If you think about it, you now are adding both additional latency sensitive heartbeat traffic as well as creating a situation where your storage traffic flows can be highly volatile. Additionally vData Center Recovery will be throwing traffic in new and interesting ways across your links.

Adjusting your network designs to deal with the cloud

Figure 1.3

First and foremost application virtualization needs a front end, in network engineering circles we have been handling this successfully for a long time with content switches (load balancers). These provide the logical rallying point for dynamic cloud applications. Since more and more systems will be utilizing these services it is important to ensure that your current content switches have headroom to grow, and if you don’t have any content switching capabilities, it is probably time to take a look at adding them to your data center.

Since applications can exist in any corner of the network, dynamic provisioning of storage and network connections has become critical. Maintaining “shadow” storage networks can provide some dynamic access to storage, however it is now becoming advantageous to virtualize your storage fabric along with your systems and network devices. Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCOE) provides just that.

If you look at figure 1.3 above, you will notice a new color introduced into the diagram, as well as the “shadow” storage network removed. This is possible because all the orange links run Data Center Ethernet (DCE) which provides a lossless path for FCOE to follow. The ESX servers now only connect into the Nexus 5000 switches. As you can see, we also have removed the shadow storage network, as it is now consolidated onto our new data center fabric. There may be use cases where we need to extend classic fibre channel connectivity out to certain hosts, and we can do that of the Nexus 5000. However if all possible it is advantageous to utlize FCOE to gain storage mobility and higher bandwidth for your hosts.

You may notice that our uplink counts have doubled. Since we are moving both storage and data traffic over the same links, as well as supporting vMotion and other bandwidth intensive network applications it is time to make the push to port channeled 10 gig adapters. Luckily prices have dropped considerably, where it is not cheaper to use 10 Gig then to bundle 8 1 Gig adapters together.

Last but not least you will notice the core switching is a different color. This is because the Nexus 7000 has found its home in the data center. I wont go to deep into the nexus as that is an article in and of itself. What I will say is that it is the best platform to use to aggregate the amount of 10 Gig links that are populating the data center in a highly available fashion. If you want to learn more about the 7000 I recommend reading these previous articles here here and here, as well as Cisco’s Data Center Switching page.

Your network once Virtual Infrastructure 4 (Vi4) and the Nexus 1000V are released

Figure 1.3

Fast forward to early summer 2008 VMware Virtual Infrastructure 4 (Vi4) and Cisco’s Nexus 1000V are released. Of course a new major version of VMware running your compute cloud, application vServices are in effect, vLockstep is running, and many other features that go with the platform such as the Nexus 1000V.

The Nexus 1000V brings a long missing feature to the Data Center, a defined network edge. Since VMware has taken hold in the Data Center, the boundary layer between the virtual machine and the network has devolved to a dumb bridge running in the memory of a ESX server. Installing the Nexus 1000V in your ESX servers creates a virtual switch with interface counters, pvlans, access controls, QOS and many other features that are critical to operating a Data Center. (check out a previous article about the Nexus 1000V).

Enjoying the fruits of our labors

Cloud computing in general, and specifically Virtual Infrastructure 4 have specific benefits that will drive efficiency and agility in IT as a whole. The mechanisms for these benefits will put increasing load on the storage and data networks in your Data Center. It is our responsibility as network architects to take a proactive stance and provision a network with the immediate future in mind. Luckily planning and preparing for these changes in advance have both benefits for our current infrastructure, as well as allowing us to enjoy the fruits of our labors as Cloud Computing changes from a buzz word to a reality.Similar Posts:

• Where is Colin ? Passing the VCP exam (VMware Certified Professional)
• Cisco releases Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware
• Altor Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA) integrated with Cisco’s Nexus 1000v for VMware
• VMworld 2009 Schedule
• Netflix Pinterest Instagram outage is not Amazon’s fault
• Measuring and mitigating risk involved with sharing virtual infrastructure between DMZ and Internal environments

--Colin McNamara

Is your network ready for Cloud Computing with Virtual Infrastructure 4?

If you are from the San Francisco bay area you will recognize the towns of Los Altos and Los Gatos. In  this diagram, the chipsets are Altos and Gatos. But where is the Los ? Missing of course, because it it a Lossless fabric.

Yes, I LOL’ed

Want to learn more?

Nexus 5000 architecture – Building blocks of the unified fabric Similar Posts:

• Cisco Nexus 7000 DataCenter switch released – Welcome to DataCenter 3.0
• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel
• Cisco Nexus 5010 released
• Cisco Nexus 4000 Blade Switch
• Three incredibly handsome men from Cisco, Nexus and EMC talk about VSPEX
• Featured on Network World – 20 useful sites for Cisco networking professionals

--Colin McNamara

Humor inside the Nexus 5000 switch fabric architecture

They broke down a couple key challenges of virtualization – Policy Enforcement, Security in a virtual environment, Management, Automation and the change from network plumbing to fabrics. At the core of the message, is the Data Center is changing. The focus of this change is virtualization. You can either get on board, or watch the work pass by you.

One topic that I have talked about in the past, is a pressing subject with Cisco – the challenges of handoff between the ESX server admins and the network admins. Again, this highlights the core value of the Nexus 1000V. About 20 minutes in, there is a bit of banter about being a “networking guy” or a “server guy”. I think this highlights a key point – To be successful deploying Data Center 3.0 technologies, you really have to be both.

Next they have a demo of the Nexus 1000V. For those of you that haven’t seen the beta in action, you will be pleasantly surprised with how it can simplify the management of your virtual network infrastructure.

Last but not least, they go into how you can leverage WAAS and its 4.1 release to accellerate your virtual desktop infrastructure. As well as showing a cool new way you can run a Windows server on a was box with the new WAVE product.

It is good to see the folks at Cisco participating in the conversation surrounding virtual data centers. I suggest you head over to the TechWise TV YouTube channel and check it out for yourself.Similar Posts:

• Cisco releases Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware
• Cisco Nexus 7000 DataCenter switch released – Welcome to DataCenter 3.0
• Simplifying your Data Center with Cisco’s Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender (FEX)
• Where is Colin ? Passing the VCP exam (VMware Certified Professional)
• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel
• Application Extension API notes – Cisco Live 2008

--Colin McNamara

Interesting TechWise TV episode on virtualization

Because VMware is central to Data Center architectures, I decided to do a deep dive over the past week. This is not my first foray into virtualization, I have used vmware workstation since 1999 and got my first exposure to Storage Networking in 2004 with ESX. Read an article from 2005 about me dealing with network issues in ESX. However VMware has has added so many interesting and relevant features that I found it was good to do a ground up review on. I have to say, that review was helpful. There are many features that as a network designer that should have been in the forefront of my mind, that I hadn’t grasped the full potential of.

As always, after a deep dive into game changing technology I am filled with more questions then answers. But the answers I do have are enough to try my luck at an exam. With an afternoon free, I decided to try my luck at the VMware Certified Professional Exam (VCP-310). Apparently my deep dive worked, because I walked away with a new cert for the binder

Now with a better understanding of the value adds that VMware Infrastructure 3 (Vi3) has in the Data Center, I need to deep dive again on VMware Infrastructure 4 (Vi4) and figure out how Virtual Data Center OS (VDC-OS) and VMware based application virtualization tie into the classic methods of application virtualization (load balancing and content switching) as well as lay down some common network architectures utilizing the Nexus and converged data center fabrics for the move towards cloud computing in the enterprise. I’ll keep you posted on the results of these deep dives, I am sure it will be interesting.

Needless to say, it is a fun time to be a Data Center geek…Similar Posts:

• Is your network ready for Cloud Computing with Virtual Infrastructure 4?
• Interesting TechWise TV episode on virtualization
• I’ll be at Cisco Live 2008 (networkers) in Orlando all week
• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel
• Cisco Nexus 7000 DataCenter switch released – Welcome to DataCenter 3.0
• VMworld 2009 Schedule

--Colin McNamara

Where is Colin ? Passing the VCP exam (VMware Certified Professional)

The one thing in my control is preparation. Preparing for the CCDE was extremely hard for me. Oddly enough, the challenge wasn’t the complexity of the content, but the breadth. For example, stack the nineteen recommended reading books on your desk, and become an expert on them.

Look at the CCDE Practical Blueprint  -

The CCDE Practical Exam is designed to assess a candidate’s ability to perform the following
tasks:
Gather, clarify, and analyze existing and new network requirements
•   Identify requirements and determine how they shape the purpose and expectations of a
given network.
•   Demonstrate the ability to gather and validate information about an existing network.
Develop network designs to meet functional specifications
•   Choose the correct technology to resolve a specific network design problem.
•   Create a network design that minimizes or eliminates negative impact on the existing
network and services.
•   Create a network design that is scalable.
•   Create a network design that is elegant and supportable.
•   Create a network design that is resilient.
Develop a plan to implement network design changes
•   Evaluate the impact of implementation options.
•   Develop contingency plans for network restoration.
Convey design decisions and rationale
•   Justify network design choices based on functional specifications.
•   Justify technology choices based on technical requirements.

I used that outline, as well as the reading list to prepare. I think you will aggree with me that if you look soley at the blueprint, that you have to cast a pretty wide net to get all of it. I interpreted this as being so open, that it was like walking with a lantern. Light from the lantern shines equally on everything, so you pay attention to litterally everything. Now, after taking the exam, I gained a bit of perspective on what exactly the developers were looking for. In this case, it would be like exchanging your lantern for a flashlight. Now, while the beam is wide, it is a lot more focused then walking with the lantern.

This perspective on the exam, or more specifically the intent and target market of the exam is invaluable. Well, I guess it is valued at the seven hundred dollars it took to take the exam . Now that I understand what they are looking for, I think I am in a good position to have a decent chance in Febuary if I don’t walk away with a CCDE number in six weeks.

Pearson

Pearson’s professional testing centers were a new experience for me. The center was clean and professional, and the staff was very helpful (including getting a couple tankards of coffee after me explaining it was the lifeblood of us geeks). However the one thing, I didn’t get the same feeling that you get when walking into the CCIE lab. If you haven’t been to the CCIE lab yet, it is almost like walking onto the football field at Notre Dame. Where in the lab you walk past the wall of pain, at Pearson it feels just like sitting down and taking any other written exam.

I do have to warn anybody who is taking this exam in the future though. If you have big feet like mine, be VERY careful of the power plugs. I managed to kick the power plug from my computer just over an hour into the exam and lost all my work. Rest assured the proctors said that the test would keep state in the production exam.

Chicago

Prior to October, I had been to chicago four times. Sadly each of those times was limited to grabbing some spankitopita at the little Greek place at Miday and then flying on to some other part of the country. This was the first time that I had managed to escape the terminal and make it into the city itself.

The first thing that struck me was how Chicago went up and not out. Coming from the west coast where cities grow out and not up, it was very weird to look up and see 1500 foot tall buildings. This urban canyon was mixed in with buildings from the 1800′s. All in all I have to say that it was pretty cool.

All 1500 feet of the Sears Tower

The other thing about Chicago is that the food is AMAZING. In less then a week in the city I managed to put on two well earned pounds. We hit up Merlot on Maple the first night. It was a quaint little northern Italian resteraunt housed in a little brownstone on the southside of Chicago. The second day we hit up Dua, the second deep dish pizzaria in chicago for lunch. Then we went to Lockwood at the Palmer Hilton for dinner.  All these places were amazing, though I have to say that I prefered the down home delicious of Dua to the others.

Deep dish done right at Dua

The last night, it was time to blow of the stress from the CCDE Practical. The CCDE team was nice enough to host a cocktail party on the ninety fifth floor of the Hancock Building.  I managed to deliver a nice little diatribe on Trill, L3VPN’s and security networks a the user and app level vs. stopping at layer 4 while being about one beer past the point where technical items should be discussed. If I managed to get into any heated discussions aboutthe importance of business relevance versus technical optimization then you have my appologies.

Sadly that party ended at 10:00 pm. Luckily Chicago is Brian McGehan’s home town. He recommended Fado’ , a great little Irish pub in the russian hill section of town. Brian, Scott, Gene, Genes wife, Ryan and I headed down there and made a good time of it till 2:00 am in the morning.

Summing it up

Eighteen months of studying culminated in 8 hours of blurry eyes in front of a computer screen trying to figure out a proctor’s intent. Looking around at the people in the waiting room, I saw many people that just blow my brain away. So if they grade on a curve, I am pretty sure I’ll be back in Febuary. Even if it goes that way, it is a good thing, because it just pushes me to learn more and become a better engineer. At the end of the day, I’m all right with that.

Similar Posts:

• It’s on like Donkey Kong – CCDE practical registration is open
• Passed CCDE written and Recertified my CCIE – Killed two birds with one stone
• CCDE Practical – Beta candidate deadline August 1 2008
• Cisco Certified Architect – Board examination above the CCIE and CCDE
• Cisco Certified Design Expert – CCDE – officially released by Cisco
• Where was Colin in 2010?

--Colin McNamara

My experience taking the CCDE Practical Beta

Tom Ludwig at http://networkvirtualization.wordpress.com pointed out quite accurately that I wasn’t explicit on the public release date for the 1000V. Thank you Tom for pointing that out – Minor confusion about the release date of Cisco’s Nexus 1000V

Scott Lowe at http://blog.scottlowe.org included me in his Day 2 VMworld coverage -  as well as his article on VMworld 2008 resources

Guy Brundson at http://blogs.vmware.com included me in the coverage of VMwares networking releases.

Andrew Kutz at http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn included me in his coverage of VMworld

Gabriel Maciel at http://it-infrastructure-management.blogspot.com included me in his must read articles list

Duncan Epping at http://www.yellow-bricks.com included me in his article – for those that didn’t go to VMworld

“Red Pinapple” at http://thinkingproblemmanagement.blogspot.com writes about and responds to my article on virtualization in the DMZSimilar Posts:

• None Found

--Colin McNamara

Link Love – Blogs that linked to me this month

• None Found

--Colin McNamara

Quoted on ZDnet – Shameless self promition

Altor networks goal is to provide a single pane view of communications within your ESX clusters, as well as ease access control list creation and deployment. With this single pane virtualization customers should be able to decrease the time needed resolve availability and security issues, allowing virtual enviornments to continue to scale.

This is a sign that we can look forward to many other software vendors adding Nexus 1000v  support to their existing product lines. I wonder who is next ? NetQOS maybe ….

Want to learn more ?

Altor NetworksSimilar Posts:

• Cisco releases Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware
• Vote for my VMworld presentation – #3221 Built to fail (shameless pandering)
• Is your network ready for Cloud Computing with Virtual Infrastructure 4?
• Interesting TechWise TV episode on virtualization
• Arista Networks – Their approach to cloud networking
• Challenges integrating VMware into Cisco networks

--Colin McNamara

Altor Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA) integrated with Cisco’s Nexus 1000v for VMware

The boundary between server team and network team responsibilities has become “fuzzy”

Cisco address’s this issue by putting a switch that can be managed via the same methods common to other network devices inside the ESX cluster. This switch runs the same code that has become standard on Cisco’s Nexus series of Data Center switches – NX-OS.

Prior to adoption of virtualization, when there was a connectivity problem with a host it was quite common for the network team to verify functionality down to the switch port. The server team would do the same. This allowed for each team to focus on areas that met their core competancy. Once we moved from a real switch port, to a dumb bridge inside ESX, lots of finger pointing resulted.

Now, with a Nexus 1000V sitting virtually inside the ESX clusters, the boundary between network and systems teams has been re-estabilished. Now when there is a problem with a host inside an ESX cluster, the network team can use the same day to day troubleshooting tools available to them in other portions of the network to resolve issues faster, and with less finger pointing.

Security controls have been moved further away from the hosts then we would like

A best practice for applying security policy is to apply controls as close to the source as possible. Think of this analogy – Your kids are blasting Radio Disney from their computer. Which of the following do you do?

A. Turn down the speakers at the source

B. Distribute earplugs to all members or the household

Of course, the obvious action is to go to the source, and apply a control (turn down the volume, and tell the kids to clean their rooms). The same principle is valid on the networking side. The best practice is to apply security policies such as VLAN ACL’s and TrustSec policies directly to the switchports that host your switches. Before the Nexus 1000V this was impossible to do in ESX, and forced many environments to move security controls further up into the distribution layer. The side effect of this was that now the security stance from host to host inside ESX clusters was diminished.

The Nexus 1000V brings something called port policies to the table to address this. What these are is pre-configured application security descriptions that are available to you systems administrators to apply in a point and click fashion. Once these policies are applied to the virtualized host, they follow the host where ever it is moved in your virtual cluster.

Provisioning and integrating the networks of VMware ESX clusters with classic networks for most is challenging at best

I wrote an article in march about this specific issue in my post – Challenges integrating VMware into Cisco networks . The core of this issue is that in general that the network integration portions of VMware ESX clusters is not really designed to address server teams , or network teams. In fact, you need to be pretty savy with both portions to successfully integrate VMware clusters into your network. In the real world, you generally find people that are good at one or the other, not both.

By putting a Nexus 1000V in your VMware clusters, you know give the networking teams something they can understand without having to learn Linux, and how it handles bridges (key to understanding ESX networking). With a Cisco switch running virtually inside your clusters, network teams can follow standard core / distribution / access models with the access layer now residing inside the ESX clusters. The network teams can also leverage their existing LAN switching skills for integrating the virtual switches in the clusters with the existing Data Center switching fabrics.

With these roadblocks addressed, Cisco is moving to further the DC 3.0 vision

To realize the DC 3.0 vision, the network inside of VMware clusters had to be under control, and follow the same architectural guidelines that the rest of our network is subject to. With the Nexus 1000V this is now a reality. The next steps withing the DC 3.0 vision to are to extend virtualization and mobility throughout our storage fabrics, and to continue to extend virtualization to the network as a whole, as well as focusing on application virtualization and acceleration to truly realize the vision of cloud computing in the data center.

On the storage virtualization side, Cisco will be using a technology called FlexAttach to enable virtual and physical hosts to change locations in the datacenter without storage team intervention (more on this in a near future post). And on the application virtulization and acceleration side, expect Cisco to continue to enhance it’s existing Application Control Engine (ACE) and Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), and further integrate these into their virtualization offerings.

Want to learn more ?

Introduction to VN-Link network services – Cisco.com

Nexus 1000V overview – Cisco.com

VMware distributed vNetwork switch demo – VMware.com

Challenges integrating VMware into Cisco networks – colinmcnamara.com

Douglas Gourley speaking about how Cisco and VMware will drive Cloud Computing in the Data CenterSimilar Posts:

• Altor Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA) integrated with Cisco’s Nexus 1000v for VMware
• Cisco Nexus 4000 Blade Switch
• Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel
• Simplifying your Data Center with Cisco’s Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender (FEX)
• Where is Colin ? Passing the VCP exam (VMware Certified Professional)
• Is your network ready for Cloud Computing with Virtual Infrastructure 4?

--Colin McNamara

Cisco releases Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware

Sadly, I have the unfortunate situation of being tagged as an insider (work in the partner community). So I have to play nice, and cannot reveal any juicy tidbits. Suffice it to say, that Jashree Ullal and Doug Gourlay weren’t pulling anyones leg in the past two years when the DataCenter 3.0 vision was established.

Stay Tuned

–ColinSimilar Posts:

• Me and the Nexus 7000 last week at the Data Center VT
• Thanks and farewell to Jayshree Ullal
• Usability features in Cisco’s Nexus 7000
• Cisco Open Networking Environment – onePK OpenFlow and OpenStack
• CCIE Party 2008 Recap – Cisco Live Networkers 2008
• John McCool chosen as Jayshree Ullal’s replacement to lead Cisco’s Data Center Switching and Services Group (DSSG)

--Colin McNamara

BIG Cisco – VMware announcement – 1:30 Pacific time

He writes about “the VLAN leaking myth” and how it encourages clients to utilize physically separate network infrastructure in the DMZ’s. Now first things first, I wouldn’t call VLAN leaking a myth. At one time it was a very real and serious vulnerability that was exploited by overflowing the capacity of the switch you were attacking, and causing it to “downgrade” from switch to a hub. Once this happened you now had access to previously protected devices, as well as having the ability to sniff data as it passed through the shared hub backplane.

As he mentions though, this is 8 years ago. Most switches have evolved to the point where backplanes far exceed the traffic that could ever be injected into their switchports. Even beyond backplane enhancements there are many ways to further firm up your security stance – Virtual Device Contexts, not using Layer 3 SVI’s on a DMZ VLAN, utilizing PVLANs, using port security, virtual routing instances, and many more. Of course, there are still many other attack vectors that still remain, but can be mitigated by utilizing features built into the majority of enterprise switches available today.

I think the real question is not “are VLANs safe in a DMZ”. The important question is have you mitigated the probability of compromise (the actual threat) to levels that are acceptable to your business. This question remains whether you have a standalone switch or not. So many times we hear about risk risk and more risk. But risk alone is meaningless in a business context. What is important is combining risk with likelihood. For that I like to use a simple table to come up with the true threat.

For example, as I drive to Fry’s there is the risk of me dying due to a car crash. The impact of me dying is very high (risk) however the likelihood of an accident is low, and furthermore I reduce (mitigate) the latent risk (threat) by wearing my seat belt. So all in all the threat of me dying on my way to Fry’s is pretty darn low.

In a business context this may be that I have public facing web servers and network devices in my DMZ. The impact of them being compromised is that my public image may be tarnished for a short time, and my end users may lose productivity if they are not able to VPN into work, or access the Internet while on premise. I mitigate this risk by using firewalls and both host and network based Intrusion Prevention Systems as well as implementing best security practices on my network and systems devices. The latent risk (threat) remaining is at a level that is acceptable to the business leaders, so the system is allowed.

One question that I have seen coming up more often as we move towards fully virtualized data centers is centered around commingling of virtual infrastructure. There are some hard questions which challenge some practices that we have held true over the years.

• Should you allow sharing of physical memory on a host virtual machine between an internal and DMZ server?
• Should you allow virtual infrastructure from multiple security zones to share a storage array or cluster of arrays?
• Should you allow multiple virtual switches in different security zones commingling on the same ESX or Hyper-V cluster?
• Should you allow virtual firewall and load balancing instances protecting internal and external zones to reside on the same hardware?
• Should you allow virtual routing instances from multiple zones to share a physical infrastructure?

In the past world of standalone systems, the additional cost of providing a wholly separate infrastructure for DMZ environments was relatively low. Each system generally had internal disk, or at most direct attached storage. Network devices themselves were scaled down to support one chassis one function. This fit quite neatly into the Enterprise Composite Network model that was quite common from 1999-2003.

Now, many data centers have moved to the Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA). In this model the cost of a virtualized data center is primarily focused on foundation elements such as the virtual storage and virtual fabrics, virtualized network, and virtual systems elements. The cost of providing additional virtualized services off these elements is low, however the cost of duplicating the physical infrastructure is quite high on both the capital and operational levels. This is forcing the technical and executive leadership at many companies to take a long hard look at the true threats they are facing in previously physically separate security zones such as DMZ’s, Financial and other secure zones. In the end, they are having to decide whether the threat remaining after their security controls is worth duplicating hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of infrastructure or not.

These are hard questions, with really no single good answer. My gut feel is that over the next few years we will continue the move towards the fully virtualized data center where components such as memory, PCI-X buses, storage and network devices are even further decentralized. This will make the cost of duplicating the infrastructure more and more significant, causing consolidated data center (or compute) fabrics to be the norm. At this point the discussion will move away from securing zones by creating separate infrastructure, to providing end to end security, starting integrated application level security, maybe with TrustSec or a dirivative, all the way down to securing the data at rest on disk. For the time being however, the best we can do is sit down and do an honest appraisel of our security stances, mitigate what we can, and do our best to design data center architectures that provide the flexibility of implementing whatever choice the technical and business leaders agree on.Similar Posts:

• Moving towards a Green Data Center – Truth behind the hype
• Cisco’s Cloud Computing Offering
• About Colin McNamara
• Simplifying remote site security with Cisco’s new video surveillance modules on the ISR
• Vote for my VMworld presentation – #3221 Built to fail (shameless pandering)
• Interesting TechWise TV episode on virtualization

--Colin McNamara

Measuring and mitigating risk involved with sharing virtual infrastructure between DMZ and Internal environments

Dear Candidate:

On August 27, Cisco will introduce a pilot for the CCIE Routing and
Switching lab exam in Beijing, China. The pilot will add a 10-minute
interview that will assess the candidate's ability to apply expert-level
networking skills and knowledge to networking problems that are encountered
on the job. After the lab orientation, a panel of three experts will conduct
a verbal interview with each candidate, asking a series of expert-level
networking questions (questions and answers will be in English). The ability
to correctly answer these questions will affect the exam score. After
completing the interview, the candidate will have the entire 8 hours to
complete the lab portion of the exam.  These scores will then be
calculated and then combined for a total score which will decide a pass
or a fail.

Our goal with this email is to let you know that your day will extend beyond
the normal testing day by approximately one hour.  The additional hour will
be at the end of the day. We hope you find this interview process
enlightening and helpful as we continue to strive for the standard the world
has come to expect from CCIE.

In my opinion this change is both needed and appropriate. In the past couple years, the two main barriers to entry with the CCIE (access to gear, and knowledge) have been lowered with the abundance of training programs as well as dynamips and it’s derivatives for gear emulation. Where in the past you were looking at a minimum of $8,000 dollars for a full lab, now you can run it on your PC at home.

From what I see, this is encouraging engineers to get their CCIE’s earlier in their career. This in itself is not a bad thing. If an engineer has dedicated themselfs to learning all the in’s and out’s of networking technology, then they really have earned the title. The problem comes when people want to take short cuts. They buy a lab of someone in China, or use other methods to get copies of the lab. To them, passing the lab and getting their number is all that is important, not truly becoming an expert in the technology.

While in the short term this may seem like the quick path to a good salary, in the long term everybody loses. Those who have cheated their way to their CCIE (while few and far between) end up devaluing the cert for the rest of us. And at the end of the day, they are just cheating themselves, and will lose their jobs when their true skills are tested.

It looks like Cisco is seeing the same thing that I have just talked about. This pilot program should go a long way into protecting the integrity of the CCIE for years to come.Similar Posts:

• What does it take to pass the CCIE exam?
• My experience taking the CCDE Practical Beta
• It’s on like Donkey Kong – CCDE practical registration is open
• Are you a kick ass engineer looking to grow?
• And it begins again – On the road to my CCIE in Storage
• Where is Colin ? Passing the VCP exam (VMware Certified Professional)

--Colin McNamara

Protecting the integrity of the CCIE lab – Verbal Interviews being tested

Similar Posts:

• Me and the Nexus 7000 last week at the Data Center VT
• Witch fire in San Diego – Notes from an evacuee
• Cisco releases Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware
• Redhat AS3.3 and VMware ESX network issues
• Weddings, Measles and Podcasting -
• RSS feeds – an intranet aggregation solution?

--Colin McNamara

Who Moved My Brain ? – A must see presentation

As a CCDE beta participant on the qualification exam, you have given us your time and feedback and have made a significant commitment to making this a valuable program in the market. As a token of our appreciation for your commitment to the success of the program, if you qualify, we are offering the beta of the practical exam to you at a reduced price of $700, a savings of $280 off the retail price of the beta exam along with a priority seat. Cisco will be offering this beta delivery of the exam on October 1, 2008, in Chicago, IL at a Pearson professional testing center. This is an exceptional offer and opportunity to be one of the first individuals in the world to obtain their CCDE certification.

There is a catch here, and hopefully everyone who is participating is able to pull their heads out of current projects soon enough to catch it.

We can’t keep priority seats forever so we’ll need your commitment by August 1, 2008. After August 1, 2008 you will be registering under open enrollment rules and we cannot guarantee your seat.

That’s right, you have 11 days to reply to the email, or forever hold your peace. In my case, them email is already sent. Hopefully I can talk my VP into letting me take that $280 I “saved” him and apply it to a really posh hotel.

–ColinSimilar Posts:

• It’s on like Donkey Kong – CCDE practical registration is open
• Cisco Certified Design Expert – CCDE – officially released by Cisco
• Passed CCDE written and Recertified my CCIE – Killed two birds with one stone
• Protecting the integrity of the CCIE lab – Verbal Interviews being tested
• My experience taking the CCDE Practical Beta
• Cisco Certified Architect – Board examination above the CCIE and CCDE

--Colin McNamara

CCDE Practical – Beta candidate deadline August 1 2008

I think Rick (5x CCIE) put it best in a company wide email earlier this afternoon  -

Please join me in congratulating Darrel in obtaining his Storage CCIE. There are only 24 double CCIES (RS/Storage) in the world, so he is probably about 1 of 15 or less in the world to hold all three.

What is everyone’s vote what is next in his career?  And, NO, you don’t have a say, Darrel

A) Service Provider

B) VOICE

C) CCDE

Thanks,

Rick Davis

ePlus, Senior Network Engineer

CCIE – Storage, Voice, Security, Service Provider, Routing and Switching (#5672)

Great job Darrel, everyone is really proud of you. and our apologies in advance to the wife for stealing you for choices A, B or C. (My vote is for C)

–Colin

Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Darrel Hinshaw – New Triple CCIE [Storage]!!!!!!!

The CCDE just got VERY real in a big way.The following announcement was posted in the CCDE zone at the Cisco Learning Network. (If you haven’t checked the Cisco Learning Network out yet, I recommend it. Its like NetPro on steriods, but focused around certifications.)

REGISTER NOW for the BETA Practical Exam
Cisco is now registering beta candidates for the CCDE Practical Exam. Cisco has finished development of the second exam needed to attain the CCDE certification, the practical exam, and is now soliciting candidates for the beta delivery.

Cisco will be offering this beta delivery of the exam on October, 1 in Chicago, Illinois at a VUE professional testing center. Only candidates that have a passing score on the CCDE qualification exam may register and participate in this exam. Exam beta pricing is $980US. Register Now by email at:ccdebeta@cisco.com

For my CCIE, it always seemed like a switched turned the moment I put my credit card information in and secured a seat. Before that button was pushed, it was a “future” item to deal with. Once that button was pushed it was a “now” item. Things like going out, having a beer with the guys, video games, etc all got shut down so my focus could burn a hole in the subject matter.

I just sent in my registration email for the CCDE practical. I’ll be in Chicago Oct 1, ready to give it my all. But, the more important lesson I learned from my CCIE was that if you focus your efforts on your lab day, you will fail. However if you focus your efforts consistently over the months before, you have a chance of passing. Now that my registration email has been sent, it is time to turn that focus dial up, lock to the door to my office and earn the CCDE through months of hard work.

See you in Chicago

–Colin

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• Cisco Certified Architect – Board examination above the CCIE and CCDE
• Protecting the integrity of the CCIE lab – Verbal Interviews being tested

--Colin McNamara

It’s on like Donkey Kong – CCDE practical registration is open

Of course, it was all worth it. Some people see networkers as primarily an opportunity to prepare for a certification. Others got to learn something completely new. Some even go just for the world of solutions and the various booth babes. What I value the most is the opportunity to see old friends, and make new ones, to sit down with someone you have just met and have a half hour conversation on distribution / access layer technologies, or just throw some darts. No matter what, the goal is to connect, learn and collaborate with my peers. This year, I can say that these goals have been achieved. See you next year at the Moscone Center in San Francisco at Cisco Live Networkers 2008.Similar Posts:

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• Colin has left ePlus Technology
• Where is Colin ? Passing the VCP exam (VMware Certified Professional)
• What does it take to pass the CCIE exam?

--Colin McNamara

Heading home – Cisco Live 2008

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--Colin McNamara

No one told me there would be a monsoon – Cisco Live Networkers 2008

Luckily we made it to the party without dying, ePlus is safe for the time being. It was nice to have Cisco show appriciation to their biggest chearleaders, and even better to run into your peers and share a drink.

The venue was nice, though I am sure in retrospect that the organizers now now that if you pack hundreds of nerds in a room with video games and beer, there is bound to be a line. The party itself did seem to die out pretty quickly, but I do have to thank the folks at Cisco for taking the time to put the vent together for us.

Next year, Cisco is on its home turf. I think I’ll be the first to put my vote into the suggestion box. My vote is for Conference Room “G” . Where ever it does end up, lets look forward to seeing each other again next year.Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

CCIE Party 2008 Recap – Cisco Live Networkers 2008

Where would you use these ?

You want  your custom application to be able to react, and act on network specific information. Integrating both at a very close level. Fundamentally your application can dynamically reconfigure your router in reaction to network events.

You want to remove common services such as AAA, Syslog, DHCP, etc, IVR apps, Unified communication apps all at the branch office in the ISR. If there is a failure, your router can dynamically reconfigure around that.

AXP architecture

Base Cisco Linux os, IOS CLI, Virtual Instances, C++, Perl, Java, OSGI, Bash. Fundementally this is very similar to a fedora core 4 systems doing paravirtualization.

API Fun – What can it do

1. You can query and change both the router and the network module
2. Leverage Embedded Event Manager (EEM) to trigger events on changes, and react to network events.
3. Network Packet monitoring .. Sniff, Sniff, Sniff

My Questions –

1. How do I automate network updates, similar to YUM?
2. Is Cisco using KVM for paravirtualization?

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• User experience testing – enhanced
• Routers can email you when they go down

--Colin McNamara

Application Extension API notes – Cisco Live 2008

NX-OS / DCNM XML API Fundamental Technology

Netconf – platform for secure communication of XML data between DCNM / NX-OS and mgmt station.

XML, using clear text tags, creates a self describing API. This is necessary because of the confusion and unneccessary complexity inherent in the current SNMP MIB based structure commonly in place today.

Webservices API = SOAP/XML over HTTPS.

Netconf/XML on NX-OS capabilities.

• Must be run over SSH
• Maximum of eight concurrent NetConf Sessions per nexus virtual device context.
• Every single CLI capabilities is assigned a XML tag

JMS is supported in DCNM as wel as NETCONF

• Native integration with IBM Message Queue

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--Colin McNamara

Cisco Nexus NX-OS and DCNM XML API’s – Cisco Live 2008

• And it begins again – On the road to my CCIE in Storage
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--Colin McNamara

Schwag at world of solutions, then off to margaritaville

In that spirit, my schedule is listed below. If you are in the area, it would be great if you would stop by and say hello.
“6/23/08″ “11:00 AM”"Certification Exam  –  Certification Exam”
“6/23/08″ “1:30 PM”"BRKCCT-1001  –  Contact Center Welcome Session: Focusing on the Experience”
“6/23/08″ “5:00 PM”"WoS Reception 1  –  Welcome Reception in World of Solutions”
“6/24/08″ “8:00 AM”"certification focus group  –  certification focus group”
“6/24/08″ “9:00 AM”"BRKITI-1031  –  Cisco Data Center 3.0 Strategy and Business Impact”
“6/24/08″ “10:00 AM”"GENKEY-1001  –  Keynote and Welcome Address with John Chambers”
“6/24/08″ “12:00 PM”"ITIPCS-1015  –  NetQoS: Getting the Most from Cisco WAN / Application Acceleration Technologies”
“6/24/08″ “1:00 PM”"BRKDEV-1221  –  Applying Cisco’s Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) and DCNM APIs to Emerging Data Center Infrastructure”
“6/24/08″ “2:00 PM”"BRKDEV-1001  –  Cisco Application eXtension Platform”
“6/24/08″ “3:00 PM”"GENSSN-1001  –  Super Session: The Power of Collaboration Panel”
“6/24/08″ “4:00 PM”"BRKSEC-3007  –  Solving Security Challenges with Embedded Event Manager”
“6/24/08″ “7:00 PM”"BRKAGG-2001  –  Multiservice Edge Architectures and Solutions for Service Providers”
“6/25/08″ “6:00 PM”"CCIE Appriciation  –  CCIE Appreciation part – Nascar Grill”
“6/25/08″ “9:00 AM”"BRKDEV-1111  –  Location Based Services using Cisco Location API”
“6/25/08″ “10:00 AM”"GENKEY-1002  –  Cisco Technology Keynote with Padmasree Warrior”
“6/25/08″ “12:00 PM”"ITIPCS-1019  –  Fluke Networks: General Parts Uses Embedded IOS Technologies to Successfully Manage Inventory at Retail Locations:
“6/25/08″ “1:00 PM”"BRKDEV-1051  –  ANA Technical Session and Demo”
“6/25/08″ “3:00 PM”"GENSSN-1002  –  Super Session: The Data Center–Evolution and Transformation:”
“6/25/08″ “4:00 PM”"BRKDEV-1131  –  Customer Voice Portal Application Development”
“6/25/08″ “8:00 PM”"Customer Event  –  Customer Appreciation Event”
“6/26/08″ “9:00 AM”"BRKITI-1034  –  Realize Business Goals through Network Architecture Solutions”
“6/26/08″ “10:00 AM”"GENKEY-1003  –  Closing Keynote Address and Guest Speaker, Ben Stein, Actor/Writer/Columnist”
“6/26/08″ “1:00 PM”"BRKCCIE-3003  –  CCDE: The Cisco Certified Design Expert”
“6/26/08″ “3:00 PM”"BRKDEV-1171  –  Managing  Network Performance using the New IOS Data Collection Services”
“6/26/08″ “4:00 PM”"BRKDEV-1181  –  Configuration and Provisioning using IOS  XML API”Similar Posts:

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• Cisco Certified Design Expert – CCDE – officially released by Cisco
• Heading home – Cisco Live 2008

--Colin McNamara

I’ll be at Cisco Live 2008 (networkers) in Orlando all week

From the network world editors -

Network World and the authors have decided to remove this blog post and the discussion that followed. While the original post was intended to highlight how the issue of braindumps is a pervasive one, we regret having singled out anyone in particular and apologize for any accusations of cheating.

I hope that Ethan is watching the outflow of support for him, and puts his site back up soon.Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Certguards inflamitory post about Ethan Banks removed from Network World Magazine

This is the first step towards sitting for a practical examination that will hopefully be released this October. And, in response to Micheal Morris’s blog post – Yes Mike, I can pass the CCDE written.

The second big item on my todo list was to recertify my CCIE. Thankfully, Cisco counts the CCDE written towards my recertification requirements. I am waiting for the system to update, but I think this will set me up to be certified till June of 2011.

There is one interesting side effect of passing my CCDE written the week before networkers. I had originally planned on using the free exam at networkers as a “safety” exam in case I struck out on this attempt. Now of course, that is not necessary. Since I am already a CCIE, there isn’t much incentive to take a professional level exam.

So, after weighing my options, I have decided to take the CCIE Service Provider written. It covers much of the MPLS / IP Next Generation Networks material that I have been studying. I only have 7 days to prepare, so the odds are against me. However, with the heavy service provider focus in the CCDE blueprint, I have a feeling after I battle the CCDE practical I will be set to roll right into the CCIE Service Provider lab.Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Passed CCDE written and Recertified my CCIE – Killed two birds with one stone

From Roberts article on networkworld

Ok, so Ethan doesn’t believe in violating the NDA that he had to sign umpteen times to get where he is now, but he’s promoting the use of Testking (a well known cheating tool) to “study” for his CCIE.

As a CCIE, I am obviously supportive of Cisco’s efforts to maintain the integrity of their (and my) certifications. And yes, Ethan was not exercising the best judgment by posting about Testking in a comment on his blog. Is that a reason to start a fire, and try to get his CCIE revoked? As a CCIE, my vote is a resounding no. While Ethan definately made a bonehead move, it does not change a couple things.

1. The CCIE written is just a gating exam, meant to limit the CCIE lab to individuals that have a chance (a notably slim chance) of passing the actual lab.
2. The CCIE exam, and its proctors are amazingly effective at weeding out cheaters. Yes, every once and a while a cheater manages to get through. But trust me, these guys get eaten alive when they look for employment.
3. Cisco has its own enforcement team and methods for finding cheaters, they have managed to keep Cisco certifications from devolving into the land of the MCSE. I think we should trust them to do their jobs, and more importantly trust their discretion.
4. Ethans site documented a very thorough preparation process as he walked the long road towards his CCIE. Sadly his site has been taken down, but in my opinion this shows that he put significant preparation in, and earned his number.

My take on things is that Ethan the target of a marketing scheme. From what I can see, Roberts efforts here are not focused on supporting Cisco’s certifications. It looks to me that he is trying to drum up traffic to his business. If you look at his products, there are $995 – $4,999 fee’s to become a “VIP site”. For your payment, you receive a seal of approval and a listing in the “VIP” area of his site.

Sadly, I have seen this scheme before in the photography world. Certain photographers have been known to set up review sites of other photographers. They build Google Page Rank (PR) on their site so they show up in searches relevant to their competition. Once they start showing up in those targeted searches they sell “VIP” listing or reviews. The photographers that pay up to become “VIP” members ensure that no bad reviews of their buisiness are put up on these sites.

Robert is running the same quasi extortion scheme, but for training vendors. I think this demonstrates a lack of integrity on Roberts part. There is no excuse for attempting to destroy Ethans name in order to make a few bucks. I refuse to condone his behavior and would hope that the editors at Network World feel the same and remove his blog from their site.

Ethan – If you read this, I hope you realize that me and others like me are on your side. You have obviously put stellar effort into both studying, and documenting your efforts. It is obvious to any reasonable person that you have earned the title of CCIE.Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Certguard, Ethan Banks, Network World and Common Sense

When I work with data center infrastructure I expect the following – clean, remotely manageable, secure devices that runs on the same power and similar cabling, and everything can have a 24x7x4 support contract for hardware replacement. For the most part, you get this when dealing with Cisco, HP, Sun and similar manufacturers.

More often then not (with a few very cool exceptions), when I run into video surveillance infrastructure the video management infrastructure runs on some random third tier manufactured server. It never fails that the video management software is on Windows (normally XP or win2k). I have even seen some systems where the vendor requires you to have a session open to run the software.

And then when you get to the encoders themselves, it never fails. You have two choices.

1. The Uber package that can run a Casino, Identify and track dust mites , and if you point it at space, determine if there is life on mars.
2. Individual dinky encoders that run one or two camera’s each. They have limited encoding choices, limited camera control, no remote management, and normally run on 110 volt system that require different power distribution then the 220 that is common in systems today.

Cisco’s answer to this mess

Cisco has released both a video management solution, as well as a video encoding solution in a network module form factor for the Integrated Services Router (ISR).

The first part of this system, the Video Management and Storage System (VMSS) module fills the following roles -

• Management of multiple video streams from one interface, including IP cameras, 3rd party encoders, and streams from Cisco’s video encoding module
• Streaming of live and archived footage through a web browser interface
• This one is pretty cool – The module can mount external storage via iSCSI. So, in addition to its 160 gig internal drive, you can mount a filer and utilize external storage to scale the system.
• “fast forward” to events, as well as notify security and other personnel through SMS and email

The second part of the system (the module on the left in the picture above) is the Analog Video Gateway Network Module (EV-IPVS-16A). It has a couple functions -

• It can take up to 16 analogue video inputs and encode them with MJPEG or MPEG4 codecs
• You can use the first two ports to output video to a external monitors
• If you are using MPEG4, it can be used as a motion detector (handy for fast forwarding to important events, or triggering alerts)
• It can control pan and tilt cameras. This is good for pointing the camera at the janitor unplugging your servers each night to vacuum
• You can configure analogue contacts as an alarm. This can be bound to a door switch, or even temperature and water level monitors in a remote data center. This one will be very handy.

The third part of this solution is Cisco’s Video Surveillance Operations Manager. It manages, archives, displays and distributes the content that was created and collected on the two previous modules. You would use this if you had many branches to aggregate, or needed to staff a video wall (e.g. casino gaming commission operations). Now, you can run each of these components individually. Buy run together as a whole, Cisco has an enterprise class security solution.

Want to learn more ?