Packet Pushers Podcast» Priority Queue

There are two proposals floating around that are trying to address BGP origination hijacks (aka Pakistan vs. YouTube): RPKI and DNSSEC-based system. Ivan Pepelnjak joins Greg Ferro to talk about what is means for Networking. This show was recorded in January 2013 and it’s been delayed publishing. Please accept my apologies. Show Links Opinionated background on the RPKI discussion >http://www.internetgovernance.org/2013/01/09/the-routing-security-battles-intensify/> (warning, heavily biased authors on this site. ) RIPE 65 Session List - https://ripe65.ripe.net/presentations/presentation-archive/ RPKI would effectively give control over route advertisement validation to regional registries (who are also allocating the address space these advertisements cover), while the alternative approach would rely on DNSSEC and/or CA infrastructure controlled by … (fill in the blanks). Also, this graph is interesting. Look who’s dragging their feet - http://certification-stats.ripe.net/ PROGRAMMABLEFLOW TECHNICAL DEEP DIVE This free webinar sponsored by NEC Corporation of America describes the benefits and technical details of ProgrammableFlow®, the first production-grade commercial implementation of an OpenFlow-based Software Defined Network with a controller and data center switches. http://www.ipspace.net/ProgrammableFlow_Technical_Deep_Dive

At Cisco Live US 2013 in Orlando, Packet Pushers co-host Ethan Banks was joined by CCDE program manager Elaine Lopes, CiscoPress author Russ White who was closely involved with the CCDE program creation, quad-CCIE & CCDE Scott Morris, and CCIE & CCDE Jeremy Filliben who instructs a CCDE bootcamp. We discuss (what else) how to prepare for the Cisco Certified Design Expert certification. We recorded this as a video in the Learning @ Cisco Live booth in the CLUS Certifications Lounge. And let me tell you - it was HOT in that little room! With 5 guests crammed in there, plus the cameraman and gear, we were five baked potatoes by the time the session was over. BUT - what a great discussion about the CCDE program! The Packet Pushers thank the Cisco Learning Network for sharing the audio with us so that we could distribute it here. If CCDE interests you, have a listen to advice given by a group of outstanding guests who understand the philosophy of the CCDE program well. The CCDE is unlikely to be like any other certification track you've been down, assuming you came up through the ranks of CCNA, CCNP and CCIE. CCDE is a different animal, with a different approach, different testing methodology, and different ultimate goals for the candidate.

In this show recorded in a small little room with a great big fan (which we were mostly able to edit out) in the "Meet the Expert" lounge at Cisco Live 2013 in Orlando, Packet Pushers Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks discuss Cisco's UCS Director product (formerly Cloupia) with folks from the UCS Director team. Before you yawn and tune out because you're not in a UCS shop, the first thing to know about UCS Director is that it's not just about Cisco UCS. UCS Director bring orchestration and automation not only to the UCS platform, but also to a variety of other products as well. If you knew of Cloupia before Cisco completed the acquisition, you might be skeptically saying, "Yeah, well...Cisco's going to kill all that non-Cisco product support now that they've gotten a hold of it." According to Joann Starke and Eric Charlesworth, that's just not the case. There's a long roadmap of non-Cisco product support coming, with plans to only broaden UCS Director's scope. We talk about that and several other things in this podcast. What does UCS Director do? Is UCS Director for orchestration, automation or both? From the perspective of a network engineer, what does UCS accomplish? How is QoS managed inside of a storage array? Let's talk about multi-vendor magic. How big of a shop is the right size to be considering UCS Director? UCS Director key features - have or have not the following: multi-tenancy, self-service, resource management? How to map high-level problems down to low-level realities. UCS Director's ability to react to events. Integrating UCS Director with Cisco's Intelligent Automation for Cloud (CIAC). LINKS Cisco's UCS Director Home Page

Cisco eXtensible Network Controller (XNC) can provide greater business agility, through a cost-effective, scalable, Software-Defined Network (SDN)-based approach to traffic monitoring. What is the XNC? What's it for? Comparing XNC Controller to OpenDaylight. What's the same? What's a value-add? What are the northbound capabilities of XNC? Southbound? Let's give some examples of what we can do with this controller. Apps: monitoring, transit selection, network slicing. What sort of network hardware is required to leverage XNC? What are some future use-cases? Clever things that might be possible with XNC & an SDN-capable network infrastructure on the scene? Cisco ONE Overview  (video): http://video.cisco.com/video/TechnologyTrends/ONE/TechnologyTrends/ONE/ (Video title: Advanced Flow Control) Overview on Monitor Manager (Video): http://video.cisco.com/video/TechnologyTrends/ONE/TechnologyTrends/ONE/ (Video Title: Increased traffic visibility with Cisco XNC) OpenDaylight - http://www.opendaylight.org

Guests Patrick Warichet Alain Fiocco @alainfiocco Andrew Yourtchenko @ayourtch Kumar Reddy @kumarreddy Show Notes You can follow the Cisco IPv6 Lab Team on Twitter at @cisco6lab “Happy Eyeballs” - RFC6555 - Happy Eyeballs: Success with Dual-Stack Hosts - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6555 Test your IPv6 http://test-ipv6.com/ IPvFoo - https://code.google.com/p/ipvfoo/ 6lab.cisco.com/stats Sessions on Cisco Live 365 from Orlando, 2013. PNLCRS–2303, Experience deploying IPv6 BRKRST-2304 Hitchhiker's Guide to Troubleshooting IPv6 Sundry Links https://ripe66.ripe.net/presentations/114-RIPE-IPv6-only-Clients-RIPE.pdf http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/iosswrel/ps6537/ps6553/whitepaper_C11–721661.html MAP demo that we did for CiscoLive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQUK5nnqilA http://blogs.cisco.com/sp/real-world-demonstration-of-map-for-ipv6/

New voices gather in the Packet Pushers virtual boardroom for a discussion of Cisco's layer 2 extension technology, Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV). Ethan Banks hosts a recording of about two hours worth of content about OTV; this show is the second hour (well, almost another hour). Joining Ethan are first-time guests Jamie Caesar, Colby Glass and Ken Matlock. Jamie, Colby and Ken have all done real-world OTV deployments. Among the three, both the Cisco Nexus 7000 platform and ASR1000 platforms are represented. What's OTV and why do you care? OTV is a layer 2 extension technology aka data center interconnect (DCI). By L2 extension, we mean extending a VLAN from one data center into a different data center, when those data centers are separated by a layer 3 boundary. OTV is a tunneling overlay that encapsulates Ethernet frames so that they can cross the layer 3 area separating the 2 data centers. While simple in concept and fairly simple to deploy, OTV is rather complex behind the scenes, which is why this was a nearly 2 hour discussion instead of 20 minute one. Here in part two, we cover the following high level topics. Redundancy of OTV edge devices. What is traffic tromboning? How do you minimize it? Managing ARP & CAM timeouts to prevent the overlay from becoming a black hole, since OTV doesn't flood unknown unicasts. Coping with MTU sizes and the overhead added by OTV encapsulation. Designing your IGP to avoid forming a routing adjacency across the overlay, which would probably result in suboptimal forwarding paths forming. Licensing. Preparing your network to add OTV. CLI configuration of OTV. Useful OTV "show" commands. Our favorite OTV documentation. LINKS Cisco OTV Home Page Cisco OTV White Papers (excellent resources) NX-OS and Cisco Nexus Switching: Next-Generation Data Center Architectures (2nd Edition) by Ron Fuller, David Jansen, Matthew McPherson (chapter dedicated to OTV)

New voices gather in the Packet Pushers virtual boardroom for a discussion of Cisco's layer 2 extension technology, Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV). Ethan Banks hosts a recording of about two hours worth of content about OTV; this show is the first hour. Joining Ethan are first-time guests Jamie Caesar, Colby Glass and Ken Matlock. Jamie, Colby and Ken have all done real-world OTV deployments. Among the three, both the Cisco Nexus 7000 platform and ASR1000 platforms are represented. What's OTV and why do you care? OTV is a layer 2 extension technology aka data center interconnect (DCI). By L2 extension, we mean extending a VLAN from one data center into a different data center, when those data centers are separated by a layer 3 boundary. OTV is a tunneling overlay that encapsulates Ethernet frames so that they can cross the layer 3 area separating the 2 data centers. While simple in concept and fairly simple to deploy, OTV is rather complex behind the scenes, which is why this was a 2 hour discussion instead of 20 minute one. Here in part one, we cover the following high level topics. What is OTV, and what problems does it solve? OTV use-cases beyond vMotion. How latency introduced by long-distance DCI impacts applications. What hardware can you run OTV on? How does OTV compare to other L2 extensions? What sort of datagrams does OTV encapsulate? How many disparate data centers can OTV stitch together? OTV's fault-isolation mechanisms. How is spanning-tree handled in an OTV deployment? Is 2 OTV edge devices always an appropriate topology? OTV design considerations, hardware and licensing. OTV terminology. Can you run multiple overlays? How do OTV endpoints discover one another when using multicast? Unicast? LINKS Cisco OTV Home Page Cisco OTV White Papers (excellent resources)

In this show we speak with Michael Haugh, the chairperson of Testing and Interoperability Working Group  https://www.opennetworking.org/working-groups/testing-a-interop  at the Open Networking Foundation. Michael is a Senior Product Line Manager and oversees Ixia’s Carrier Ethernet go-to-market strategy and product line on the Ixia core and IxN2X platforms. Michael has been in networking for 17 years and is a CCIE #4334. The working group, is a vendor focussed committee that is responsible for Certification, Interoperability and Benchmarking for vendors OpenFlow hardware to receive ONF certification of conformance.  The group defines testing suites, verify interoperability in a multi-vender environment and holds private events for vendors to participate. Examples of testing metrics include, flow table capacity, stats handling and OpenFlow messaging rates. Show Links Testing at Interop you can follow Mike on his corporate twitter handle @IXIAcom

Spirent Axon: Rapid answers to the question, “Will it work?” The average enterprise needs to do a considerable amount of verification to ensure applications and networks run properly. However IT operations teams don’t typically have the time for complex testing setups and executions. Take for example a new video conferencing service that will allow remote employees and multiple branch offices to seamlessly connect with other staff members in virtual rooms. Before such a setup is deployed, there are many unknowns and potentially some “growing pains” such as packet loss problems and non-optimal QoE. Network engineers need a test tool that is able to perform the most complex tests, but can be configured and present results in simple terms. The typical IT operations personnel does not need or want to know all the ins and outs of the various testing methodologies (in this case IPv4 and HTTP among others), they just want to know if their configuration works, and if it doesn’t, do they have the information to find the problem quickly.

Ethan Banks and Tony Bourke discuss the Cisco Data Center certifications, focusing on the CCNA & CCNP tracks. We take a look at what the tracks cover, who the right candidates are for these tracks, and how to prep. Inevitably, a few rabbit trails are followed as we pontificate about FCoE adoption or lack thereof, Tony's progress in the CCIE DC track, the value of having Cisco DC certs but no VMware certs, the technology collision in the modern data center as job responsibilities change, and whether or not these tracks are too Cisco-focused. Oh. And isn't it about time we move to performance-based testing via challenge labs instead of multiple-choice questions at the professional level certs? Links Tony's Blog CCNA Data Center Track CCNP Data Center Track NX-OS and Cisco Nexus Switching: Next-Generation Data Center Architectures - book Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS): A Complete Reference Guide to the Cisco Data Center Virtualization Server Architecture, 2nd Edition - book coming in July 2013  

In this show we speak with Curt Beckmann as chairperson of Forwarding Abstractions Working Group (FAWG) at the Open Networking Foundation. The FAWG is a vendor focussed committee that aims to bridge the art of the possible in the silicon chip manufacturing space of the network vendors and the drive to deliver new features. Silicon takes years to design test and manufacture, and the OpenFlow /SDN standards are racing to add new features. The FAWG stands in the middle of that debate. Lets discuss the competing requirements and how the vendors are working to support the current OpenFlow standards, while balancing the requirements to deliver products.

On December 13, 2012, the Packet Pushers published show 128, a video podcast with Big Switch Networks, where Dan Hersey & Andrew Harding discuss & demo the Big Switch controller, and applications that run on the Big Switch controller such as Big Virtual Switch and Big Tap. If you haven't seen that show yet, you might want to give show 128 a view before listening to this podcast. What this podcast covers is the Q&A session after the formal recording of show 128 was complete. There were a lot questions from the live audience, and we talked through several of them. These questions & answers are excellent for helping a traditional network engineer better understand the Big Switch controller and how it fits into both current and future network designs. Speaking on the podcast are the usual Packet Pushers co-hosts Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro with Dan Hersey & Andrew Harding from Big Switch. What We Discuss Explain how the Big Switch controller is plumbed to the network and how it is redundant. Is there as separate or out-of-band network for control-plane or management traffic? Explain the pros and cons of physical vs. virtual switches. What version of OpenFlow is supported today, and what's the roadmap for other versions of OpenFlow? What's the status of standardization for northbound APIs? What is a REST API? What does software defined networking mean for network security? Can a Big Switch network route between L3 domains? Is there IPv6 support? What are the performance numbers? Where is the bottleneck in a Big Switch environment? What's the status of a GUI vs. CLI vs. other means of interacting with the controller? Discuss Big Switch's open approach to SDN as compared to some other vendors.  

Cisco contributes quite a bit of code to the open source world, and Michael Enescu, CTO for Open Source Initiatives, is just the guy to tell the Packet Pushers audience about it. In this discussion with hosts Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro, Michael discusses the what, why and how of Cisco's open source efforts. What We Discuss The difference between "open source" and "open standards". The open source initiatives Cisco is involved with (Linux kernel, Quantum, OpenStack, etc.) How Cisco functions internally when dealing with open source projects. The benefits Cisco customers receive due to Cisco's open source involvement. Cisco's track record of openness. Links The Yang of Open Standards, The Yin of Open Source

Shortly after the Brocade launch of the Brocade VDX in September 2012 I got Ivan Pepelnjak on the show to talk about the reality check (  OK, so this one has been sitting in the vault for too long, so shoot me). Lets get underneath the glamour of the launch event and talk performance, capacity and reality. A very fine grumpy look at vendor promises. -grin- This is the original show I recorded while at the Brocade Analyst Day - PQ – Show 11 – Brocade VDX 8770 – Technical Deep Dive You can find Ivan at his very fine blog IPspace.net and you really should have subscribed to his Webinars already.

In this impromptu and live recording, after having twitpiss about it, Greg & Derick go head to head on the topic whether MPLS is dead in an SDN world. Lets have the debate in full and proper order, and see who can convince the listeners.