Rick Donato

Introduction This article provides a summary to some of the key points around vSAN network design. For full details around vSAN network design please review https://storagehub.vmware.com/export_to_pdf/vmware-r-vsan-tm-network-design. What is vSAN? vSAN is a hypervisor-converged, software-defined storage solution for the software-defined data centre. It is

Introduction If you look at the market around OpenStack distro's it can be daunting, there are many flavours, that all look to do the same thing - automate the installation of OpenStack and ease the tweaking of the nerd knobs. In my quest to find a suitable OpenStack

VMware recently announced changes to the NSX portfolio (the new NSX pillars shown below), introducing new NSX product pillars, on in other words a rebrand on the previous NSX product set. Figure 1: NSX Portfolio However, when it comes to licensing, it is good to know that the previous licensing

What is the Local Preference? Local Preference (aka LOCAL_PREF) is a BGP well-known attribute that is used when there are multiple exit paths out from a single AS exist. Whereas the MED is used to tell routers outside of an AS which entrance path to take, the LOCAL_PREF

What is the MED? The MED (Multi-Exit Discriminator) is an optional BGP attribute, that is used when there are multiple external points for a single AS. For example, you may want traffic coming into your AS destined for network A to take one path but traffic destined for network B

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), have just released issue #1 of their new magazine. For those of you who may not have heard of ETSI, they are an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization in the telecommunications industry. This includes standards such as the NFV MANO framework. For those of you

What is a BGP Peer Group? BGP peer groups are used to simplify configuration and to improve performance. This is achieved by assigning the same outbound policy to each of the neighbours. Because UPDATEs are generated only once per peer group rather multiple times for each neighbouring router, peer groups

TL;DR A path attribute is an additional piece of information associated with a prefix, included within the UPDATE packet during route exchange. Path attribute types include: Well-known - Must be recognized by all BGP implementation Mandatory ALWAYS be included within BGP UPDATE. Discretionary MUST be recognized by ALL implementations.

Introduction Within this article, we will look at the history of spine and leaf. We will first look at the problems seen with traditional networks, the background to the spine and leaf architectures aka Clos, and then finally look at how this fits into the spine and leaf architectures of