Yesterday I described how the limited flow setup rates offered by most commercially-available switches force the developers of production-grade OpenFlow controllers to drop the microflow ideas and focus on state abstraction (people living in a dreamland usually go in a totally opposite direction). Before going into OpenFlow-specific details, let’s review the existing forwarding state abstraction technologies.
Last week I described the problems high-end service provider routers (or layer-3 switches if you prefer that terminology) face when they have to update large number of entries in the forwarding tables (FIBs). Will these problems go away when we introduce OpenFlow into our networks? Absolutely not, OpenFlow is just another mechanism to download forwarding entries (this time from an external controller) not a laws-of-physics-changing miracle.
One of my Twitter friends sent me this question: “Would you honestly recommend your webinar subscription for a young CCIE that knows how routing works but have no real world experience and is a noob in DC/VM/NXOS?” That sounds like a perfect audience to me – I usually assume the attendees have mastered the fundamentals of networking/routing but don’t know much about the topics of the webinar (the whole idea of my webinars is to help you get started in new technology areas).
Most interesting article in this batch: Ethernet Taps - Don't Get Me Started by Chris Marget, focusing on Ethernet taps: passive, active, aggregators, L1 switches ...
And here are the other interesting links I found in somewhat random order:
Did you rush to try OSPF Loop Free Alternate on a Cisco 7200 after reading my LFA blog post ... and disappointedly discovered that it only works on Cisco 7600? The reason is simple: while LFA does add feasible-successor-like behavior to OSPF, its primary mission is to improve RIB-to-FIB convergence time.
Assume we have a simple triangular network:
Now imagine the A-to-C link fails. How will OSPF react to the link failure as compared to EIGRP? Which one will converge faster? Try to answer the questions before pressing the Read more link ;)
Scott Lowe asked a very good question in his Technology Short Take #20:
VXLAN uses UDP for its encapsulation. What about dropped packets, lack of sequencing, etc., that is possible with UDP? What impact is that going to have on the “inner protocol” that’s wrapped inside the VXLAN UDP packets? Or is this not an issue in modern networks any longer?
Short answer: No problem.
In the Redundant DMVPN Design, Part 1 I described the options you have when you want to connect non-redundant spokes to more than one hub. In this article, we’ll go a step further and design hub and spoke sites with multiple uplinks.
Public IP addressing
Fact: DMVPN tunnel endpoints have to use public IP addresses or the hub/spoke routers wouldn’t be able to send GRE/IPsec packets across the public backbone.
One of my readers couldn’t figure out which IPv6 webinar to buy. He wrote:
I bought your Service Provider IPv6 Introduction webinar. I’m also interested in Building IPv6 Service Provider Core and Building Large IPv6 Access Networks. I realized that the second training is not released yet and it says that it's an update session for the first training, so do I need to buy both? I would like to download all the material related to the trainings so I would watch them whenever I need.
It seems I did overcomplicate a few things, so I’ll try to clear up the confusion I created.
According to Google Analytics these were the most popular posts I wrote in December 2011:
- Is NAT a security feature?
- Decouple virtual networking from the physical world
- Large-scale L2 DCI: a true story
- We just might need NAT66
- VMware vSwitch – the baseline of simplicity
- Junos Day One: MPLS Behind The Scenes
- VXLAN, IP multicast, OpenFlow and control planes
- Which virtual networking technology should I use?
- Nexus 1000V and vMotion
- IPv6 multihoming without NAT: the problem
- VM-aware Networking Improves IaaS Cloud Scalability
It’s hard for me to admit, but there just might be a corner use case for split subnets and inter-DC bridging: even if you move a cold VM between data centers in a controlled disaster avoidance process (moving live VMs rarely makes sense), you might not be able to change its IP address due to hard-coded IP addresses, be it in application code or configuration files.
Disaster recovery is a different beast: if you’ve lost the primary DC, it doesn’t hurt if you instantiate the same subnet in the backup DC.
A while ago I described the pre-standard way Cisco IOS used to get delegated IPv6 prefixes from a RADIUS server. Cisco’s documentation always claimed that Cisco IOS implements RFC 4818, but you simply couldn’t get it to work in IOS releases 12.4T or 15.0M. In December I wrote about the progress Cisco is making on the DHCPv6 front and iord@intracom.com commented that IOS 15.1S does support RFC 4818. You know I absolutely had to test that claim ... and it’s true!
2012-01-19: The initial version of this post contained a serious error: Cisco IOS DHCPv6 server does not create host routes; without on-link prefix, the router cannot forward the packets to the attached end-hosts.
IPv6 hosts can use stateless or stateful autoconfiguration. Stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) uses IPv6 prefixes from Router Advertisement (RA) messages; stateful autoconfiguration uses DHCPv6. The routers can use two flags in RA messages to tell the attached end hosts which method to use:
Most of the DMVPN-related questions I get are a variant of the “how many tunnels/hubs/interfaces/areas do I need for a redundant DMVPN design?” As always, the right answer is “it depends” (and I can always help you with your design if you’d like to get a second opinion), but here’s what I’ve learned so far.
I got plenty of responses to the How could we filter extraneous BGP prefixes post, some of them referring to emerging technologies and clean-slate ideas, others describing down-to-earth approaches. Thank you all, you’re fantastic!
Lots of interesting links accumulated in my Evernote notebook during the last two weeks. Let's start with a design masterpiece — Historical Thursday: The Other Manhattan Project: Almost as good as stretched clusters ... and almost as useful ;)
And here are the other links in somewhat random order:
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