Technology Short Take #24
Published on 30 Jul 2012 · Filed in Information · 622 words (estimated 3 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #24, another instance of my irregularly-published collection of links, thoughts, and rants on various data center technologies like networking, operating systems, security, hardware, virtualization, and cloud computing. This is a slightly shorter version of my Technology Short Takes; I’m trying to pare down since some readers have indicated the previous Short Takes weren’t short enough. Anyway, I hope you find something useful.
Networking
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This page is a decent reference to the open source software-defined networking (SDN) projects that are out there. While I’m sure it’s not comprehensive—open source projects can be difficult to track sometimes—it’s at least a good starting point.
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Here’s an older article by Brad Hedlund on building a leaf-spine design with either 40G or 10G. Which is better? As usual, the IT answer is, “It depends.” It’s a good article overall, although it reminds me that I still have so much to learn in networking. It’s a good thing there are smart folks like Brad who are willing to share their knowledge.
Security
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Bromium finally “opened the kimono” to talk about what they’re doing. I had the chance to chat with Simon Crosby, and I must say that it’s pretty cool stuff. If you haven’t yet read it, check out Simon’s post at BrianMadden.com.
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While I was in Indianapolis last week for the Indianapolis VMUG, I sat in on a session by Lancope on the use of Netflow to secure your network. The presenter showed a list of open source Netflow tools. I haven’t gotten the specific list that the presenter used, but I did find this list–perhaps it will be useful.
Storage
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In 2009 I wrote a piece explaining NPIV and NPV. In May Tony Bourke posted a write-up of NPIV and NPV as well, and did a good job of drawing some analogies about these technologies. There’s a great discussion going on in the comments as well, so I recommend reading the comments too.
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This article is titled “Understanding IO,” but it really seems like more of a write-up on various IO analysis tools. Still quite useful, even though it seems to be a bit focused on Solaris.
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I finally got around to reading Stephen Foskett’s I/O Blender series (part 1, part 2, and part 3), in which he describes the current state of storage and virtualization as a introduction to some of the ideas that VMware described in their “next-generation” storage presented last year at VMworld 2011; in particular, the demultiplexer.
Virtualization
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Maish Saidel-Keesing has a three-part write-up on installing and configuring OpenIndiana in a VM (part 1, part 2, and part 3). This is not something I’ve had the opportunity to work with, although I have worked some with Solaris in the past. (In fact, this weekend I tried to find a Solaris 10 x86 ISO I used to have somewhere because I was going to build a Solaris 10 VM for some Puppet testing and couldn’t find it. Bummer.)
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Via Vladan Seget, I saw that VMware vSphere 5.0 has achieved Common Criteria EAL4+ certification.
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This VMware KB article has a great PDF attached that covers vSphere’s various memory management techniques.
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Working your way toward taking the VCAP-DCD exam? This site, while a bit dated, has some good resources for VDCD410 (the vSphere 4 version of the exam). Of course, there’s also this little video training course that was recently released.
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Here’s a Citrix Knowledge Center article that provides more information on SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) support within XenServer (and, by extension, Xen Cloud Platform/XCP).
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There’s an interesting note here about interactions between SIOC and SRM 5.
That’s it for this time around; feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments below. Courteous comments are always welcome!