Rick Donato

SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) is an extension to the PCI Express (PCIe) specification. Virtual Functions (VF) are created that act like a separate physical NIC for each VM; the VF in the NIC is then given a descriptor that tells it where the user space memory, owned

Introduction Within this article we will look at some of the issues around the native (i.e no SR-IOV, DPDK etc) Linux datapath when moving a packet through a system, from NIC to a virtual instance. We will do so by tracing the path of a packet through the

Introduction Within this article, we answer the question - What is Segment Routing (SR)? But before we do we should first review MPLS, to understand the key benefits that SR brings. Let's go... MPLS Before looking at segment routing it's good to understand traditional MPLS. With traditional

Introduction One of the key concerns when it comes to NFV is around performance, and that the network function you are virtualizing can deliver that of its hardware counterpart. However, with all the vendors competing to ensure their hardware based platforms are the fastest, through a range of dedicated based

Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), is an OASIS standard language to describe a topology of cloud based web services, their components, relationships, and the processes that manage them.[1] This in turn provides portability and agnostic automation management across cloud providers regardless of underlying platform or infrastructure.

Introduction The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization in the telecommunications industry. Over the years ETSI have developed a number of standards/frameworks around NFV, that has lead to NFV ETSI MANO (Management and Orchestration). We will first look at the inital NFV

Introduction Within this article, we will look into the basics of MPLS. To understand the need for MPLS, let us first review the process of IP packet forwarding. IP Packet Process When a router needs to forward a packet to another router, there are 3 basic steps: 1. The router

The other day I was asked, What interface should we use for the vPC peer-keepalive link? In fact this is a good question, considering the fact you wouldnt want to burn a SFP port just for the peer keepalive. After a short amount of digging, the answer was found

Introduction We now come to the final part of the Cisco IOS FHRP series - GLBP (Gateway Load Balancing Protocol). Again, we will look at its features and then the configuration steps required to configure it on the Cisco IOS platform. What is GLBP? GLBP is a Cisco proprietary protocol, that