Design

Over the last 6-9 months, I have been reviewing the vast majority of a new book just released to print by Frank Denneman ↗ and Niels Hagoort ↗ - The vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive ↗. This book is, without a doubt, the most in-depth look at host design I have ever read, we are not talking about standard best practices here, though those are in there too. More, low-level understanding of why best practices exist and even challenging some existing perceptions and paradigms about why technologies should be used and more importantly, how they should be utilised....

Based on my last post, you’ll understand some of the challenges that are faced with traditional approaches to datacenter networking so let’s get into the high-level conceptual design here of how we might solve one of these problems. Most service providers have or are at least familiar with using MPLS for customer segregation in a WAN scope as I alluded to in my previous datacenter networking article. What we want to do is simplify the provisioning and distribution of subnets to a customer’s virtual environment, all the way up to the WAN....

As of late, I have been getting my feet wet in more networking things - Firstly out of necessity, but it has grown into a genuine area of interest to me. I have a homelab that I like to simulate a production working environment in, so I had a nice opportunity to lab up what a possible multi-tenant IaaS architecture might look like using NSX. NSX fundamentally changes how customer environments for service providers are designed - it moves the complexity away from the physical network and up into the hypervisor management layer, let’s be honest anything that limits touching the physical infra is good, right?...