VMware’s vDS is a bit of a misnomer In a previous post, I covered the concept of transitivityin networking — but in Layer 2 (Ethernet) land, transitivity is critically important to understanding how VMware’s Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS) works. The statement “VMware’s Virtual Distributed Switch is not a switch” seems controversial, but let’s take a moment to reflect…

Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) has turned out to be a great tool for deploying virtual network resources, but the “only Cisco VNFs” limitation is a bit much. Let’s use this opportunity to really take advantage of the capabilities that NSX-T has for virtual network labs! Overview For the purpose of lab…

There are numerous advantages to deploying an internal root CA to an enterprise: Autonomy: Enterprises can control how their certificates are issued, structured, and revoked independently of a third party. Slow or fast replacement cycles are permissible if you control the infrastructure, letting you customize the CA to the business…

VMware’s NSX Datacenter product is designed for a bit more than single enterprise virtual networking and security. When reviewing platform maximums ( NSX-T 3.2 ConfigMax), the listed maximum number of Tier-1 routers is 4,000 logical routers. Achieving that number takes a degree of intentional design, however. When building a multi-tenant…

Inventory: Playbooks for network providers specify targets inside of their module, not using Ansible’s inventory. If an inventory is used, the playbook will execute once on every inventory host, targeting the same destination device — not good. Credentials are stored internally to the leveraged module Any parameters that would constitute…

Have you ever wondered what happened to all the privately-addressed traffic coming from any home network? Well, if it isn’t explicitly blocked by the business, it’s routed, and this is not good. Imagine what data leakage can occur when a user mistypes a destination IP — the traffic goes out…

GitOps GitOps, a term coined in 2017, describes the practice of performing infrastructure operations from a Git repository. In this practice, we easily develop the ability to re-deploy any broken infrastructure (like application managers), but that doesn’t really help infrastructure engineers. From the perspective of an Infrastructure Engineer, Git has a…

Idempotence and Declarative Methods — not just buzzwords Idempotence Coined by Benjamin Peirce, this term indicates that a mathematical operation will produce a consistent result, even with repetition. Idempotence is much more complicated subject in mathematics and computer science. IT and DevOps use a simplified version of this concept, commonly leveraging flow logic instead of Masters-level Algebra.

NSX-T 3.2 has been released, and has a ton of spiffy features. The NSX ALB integration is particularly neat, but while repeatedly (repeatably) breaking the integration to learn more about it, I ran into this error: When deploying NSX ALB appliances from the NSX Manager, it’s very important to keep…