Overlay Transport Virtualization
Monday, February 08, 2010 Category : Cisco, cloud 0
I am seeing quite a few comments appearing regarding Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualisation recently so I figured it was worth commenting on.
Musings on areas of technology that effect the Enterprise. Focus on Cloud, Virtualisation, Storage and Data Center.
Home > February 2010
Monday, February 08, 2010 Category : Cisco, cloud 0
I am seeing quite a few comments appearing regarding Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualisation recently so I figured it was worth commenting on.
Saturday, February 06, 2010 Category : Cisco, UCS, VCE, VMware 0
Cisco had their quarterly quarter earnings call a few days ago [transcript care of Seeking Alpha]. These things are really interesting and I am starting to follow them. The senior people give some good summary of they latest goings on in their company and the analysts usually ask some good questions.
Richard Gardner – CitigroupSo early implementations of UCS have gone into big service providers and enterprise. How the early implementations succeed is key for ongoing success. Again mention of UCS being an architectural play with reference of how it is networking, processing and storage combining to deliver applications and Cloud.
Okay great. Well, most of my questions have been answered, but I did want to ask you where you're seeing the most success in UCS? You're obviously on a pretty good trajectory there quarter to quarter. Where are you seeing the most success in terms of applications in workloads? Can you talk about who you go up against most often in competitive bidding situations? And why customers choice UCS over competing products when they (inaudible) as your product?
John T. Chambers
Let me take a little bit of cut at it, but I want to also not mislead you. We’re just up to 400 customers. Most of those are doing pilots and implementation. How the first couple dozen go in the big account service providers and enterprise to determine how your next wave goes. Why we’re winning, it’s an architectural play. I (inaudible) it’s a very well class product which in my opinion one that is well ahead of our competitors at this point in time. But it’s the architecture and how the network and possessing capability and storage capability comes together with the applications and the cloud. And the ability to build the architectures where many of the costumers are doing net.
Others are doing it and we’ve been surprised a little bit we’re off in the commercial market play with some real leading edge commercial customers just saying, hey, you save so much in terms of my splurge costs. So much in flexibility and you’re headed to where you’re going to go without locking me in and best in class products in each category. We’re going to line with you.
I probably would say, I would poll a discussion on tele-presences for the next quarter call. We’re probably two quarters out from being able to do the same meaningful discussion on the UCS side of the house. So what I think you can say is that we’re not only holding our own in the data center and virtualization. Padma, what you started with Cloud and what we’re really driving through, we’re having very good success with.
I think there are a lot of opportunities on the back of our partnerships with Cisco and VCE, and revitalizing our DELL partnership; I think those two are massive opportunities for us if we do them right, and I believe we can do them both right. Of course, as we really get into this next generation of how we take the cloud computing and really bring it, internal or private cloud market is going to be a big, big, big opportunity for us and how we really execute on that is phenomenal.
Friday, February 05, 2010 Category : Cisco, EMC, UCS, VCE, VMware 5
I have been reading through all of the VCE vBlock reference documents that were recently published as announced by Chad. The last thing we want is for our implementation to be forked, away from the blessed best practices. [jump to the end for brief comments on the guides, this post is about something else]
In the deployment guide it details various UCS manager policies that should be created, I noticed that it specifies creating a "Local Disk Configuration Policy" set to "No Local Storage". The default is for any configuration.
What the Local Disk Configuration Policy does it configure up the installed disks in your blades as the service profile is deployed to them. Forget going into the BIOS and setting things up, this is virtual hardware and stateless computing people. You just pick a policy, of say RAID Mirror, and when your server profile is applied to the blade it configures the RAID controller automatically. As an aside, you can also have local storage qualifications to even say what size disk you want, so you can deploy your server profile asking it to find a spare blade that matches your requirements.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010 Category : VMware 0
We just finished the first APAC Virtualisation Roundtable podcast which got off the ground due to Andre Leibovici.
Your UCS Fabric Interconnects (F-I) can work in End Host Mode (EHM), the recommended setting or Switch Mode. In EHM the F-I "forwarding is based on server-to-uplink pinning. A given server interface uses a given uplink regardless of the destination it’s trying to reach. Therefore, fabric interconnects don’t learn MAC addresses from external LAN switches, they learn MACs from servers inside the chassis only. The address table is managed so that it only contains MAC addresses of stations connected to Server Ports. Addresses are not learned on frames from network ports; and frames from Server Ports are allowed to be forwarded only when their source addresses have been learned into the switch forwarding table. Frames sourced from stations inside UCS take optimal paths to all destinations (unicast or multicast) inside. If these frames need to leave UCS, they only exit on their pinned network port. Frames received on network ports are filtered, based on various checks, with an overriding requirement that any frame received from outside UCS must not be forwarded back out of UCS. However fabric interconnects do perform local switching for server to server traffic. This is required because a LAN switch will by default never forward traffic back out the interface it came in on." (source)
Monday, February 01, 2010 Category : cloud 0
Do your applications have a pCard yet? Given the hopes of some industry people one day they may.
[A] pCard is a calling card for a software payload--whether simple single container payloads, or complex multi-container distributed payloads--that contains the information needed by a service provider to determine
a) if they can meet the needs of the payload, and
b) what kind of services are required to do so (and their costs).Rather than having to deliver the whole payload of the workload you can just deliver the requirements via a pCard to determine if the provider can deliver your requirements.
Andre Leibovici is trying to start up a APAC Virtualization Roundtable run via Talkshoe like the VMTN Communities Roundtable.
The first one is on this Wednesday night at 9:00pm Sydney time.
If you are in APAC, or anywhere else you may want to join in.
http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/75046
Rodos
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