Technology Short Take #40
Published on 8 Apr 2014 · Filed in Information · 1191 words (estimated 6 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #40. The content is a bit light this time around; I thought I’d give you, my readers, a little break. Hopefully there’s still some useful and interesting stuff here. Enjoy!
Networking
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Bob McCouch has a nice write-up on options for VPNs to AWS. If you’re needing to build out such a solution, you might want to read his post for some additional perspectives.
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Matthew Brender touches on a networking issue present in VMware ESXi with regard to VMkernel multi-homing. This is something others have touched on before (including myself, back in 2008—not 2006 as I tweeted one day), but Matt’s write-up is concise and to the point. You’ll definitely want to keep this consideration in mind for your designs. Another thing to consider: vSphere 5.5 introduces the idea of multiple TCP/IP stacks, each with its own routing table. As the ability to use multiple TCP/IP stacks extends throughout vSphere, it’s entirely possible this limitation will go away entirely.
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YAOFC (Yet Another OpenFlow Controller), interesting only because it focuses on issues of scale (tens of thousands of switches with hundreds of thousands of endpoints). See here for details.
Servers/Hardware
- Intel recently announced a refresh of the E5 CPU line; Kevin Houston has more details here.
Security
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This one slipped past me in the last Technology Short Take, so I wanted to be sure to include it here. Mike Foley—whom I’m sure many of you know—recently published an ESXi security whitepaper. His blog post provides more details, as well as a link to download the whitepaper.
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The OpenSSL “Heartbleed” vulnerability has captured a great deal of attention (justifiably so). Here’s a quick article on how to assess if your Linux-based server is affected.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
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I recently built a Windows Server 2008 R2 image for use in my OpenStack home lab. This isn’t as straightforward as building a Linux image (no surprises there), but I did find a few good articles that helped along the way. If you find yourself needing to build a Windows image for OpenStack, check out creating a Windows image on OpenStack (via Gridcentric) and building a Windows image for OpenStack (via Brent Salisbury). You might also check out Cloudbase.it, which offers a version of cloud-init for Windows as well as some prebuilt evaluation images. (Note: I was unable to get the prebuilt images to download, but YMMV.)
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Speaking of building OpenStack images, here’s a “how to” guide on building a Debian 7 cloud image for OpenStack.
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Sean Roberts recently launched a series of blog posts about various OpenStack projects that he feels are important. The first project he highlights is Congress, a policy management project that has recently gotten a fair bit of attention (see a reference to Congress at the end of this recent article on the mixed messages from Cisco on OpFlex). In my opinion, Congress is a big deal, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how it evolves.
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I have a related item below under Virtualization, but I wanted to point this out here: work is being done on a VIF driver to connect Docker containers to Open vSwitch (and thus to OpenStack Neutron). Very cool. See here for details.
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I love that Cody Bunch thinks a lot like I do, like this quote from a recent post sharing some links on OpenStack Heat: “That generally means I’ve got way too many browser tabs open at the moment and need to shut some down. Thus, here comes a huge list of OpenStack links and resources.” Classic! Anyway, check out the list of Heat resources, you’re bound to find something useful there.
Operating Systems/Applications
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A short while back I had a Twitter conversation about spinning up a Minecraft server for my kids in my OpenStack home lab. That led to a few other discussions, one of which was how cool it would be if you could use Heat autoscaling to scale Minecraft. Then someone sends me this.
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Per the Microsoft Windows Server Team’s blog post, the Windows Server 2012 R2 Udpate is now generally available (there’s also a corresponding update for Windows 8.1).
Storage
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Did you see that EMC released a virtual edition of VPLEX? It’s being called the “data plane” for software-defined storage. VPLEX is an interesting product, no doubt, and the introduction of a virtual edition is intriguing (but not entirely unexpected). I did find it unusual that the release of the virtual edition signalled the addition of a new feature called “MetroPoint”, which allows two sites to replicate back to a single site. See Chad Sakac’s blog post for more details.
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This discussion on MPIO and in-guest iSCSI is a great reminder that designing solutions in a virtualized data center (or, dare I say it—a software-defined data center?) isn’t the same as designing solutions in a non-virtualized environment.
Virtualization
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Ben Armstrong talks briefly about Hyper-V protected networks, which is a way to protect a VM against network outage by migrating the VM to a different host if a link failure occurs. This is kind of handy, but requires Windows Server clustering in order to function (since live migration in Hyper-V requires Windows Server clustering). A question for readers: is Windows Server clustering still much the same as it was in years past? It was a great solution in years past, but now it seems outdated.
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At the same time, though, Microsoft is making some useful networking features easily accessible in Hyper-V. Two more of Ben’s articles show off the DHCP Guard and Router Guard features available in Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012.
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There have been a pretty fair number of posts talking about nested ESXi (ESXi running as a VM on another hypervisor), either on top of ESXi or on top of VMware Fusion/VMware Workstation. What I hadn’t seen—until now—was how to get that working with OpenStack. Here’s how Mathias Ewald made it work.
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And while we’re talking nested hypervisors, be sure to check out William Lam’s post on running a nested Xen hypervisor with VMware Tools on ESXi.
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Check out this potential way to connect Docker containers with Open vSwitch (which then in turn opens up all kinds of other possibilities).
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Jason Boche regales us with a tale of a vCenter 5.5 Update 1 upgrade that results in missing storage providers. Along the way, he also shares some useful information about Profile-Driven Storage in general.
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Eric Gray shares information on how to prepare an ESXi ISO for PXE booting.
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PowerCLI 5.5 R2 has some nice new features. Skip over to Alan Renouf’s blog to read up on what is included in this latest release.
I should close things out now, but I do have one final link to share. I really enjoyed Nick Marshall’s recent post about the power of a tweet. In the post, Nick shares how three tweets—one with Duncan Epping, one with Cody Bunch, and one with me—have dramatically altered his life and his career. It’s pretty cool, if you think about it.
Anyway, enough is enough. I hope that you found something useful here. I encourage readers to contribute to the discussion in the comments below. All courteous comments are welcome.