switch

Cisco Router – Switch DHCP server configuration

DHCP server on a Cisco router or switch.

DHCP is an application layer protocol used to distribute network configuration parameters, such as IP addresses, subnet masks, default gateways, etc.. to devices on the network. a DHCP client send request to a DHCP server. A DHCP server is assigns network parameters (IP address) to the DHCP client from configured IP addresses pool.

Cisco router and switches can be configured as a DHCP server, In this post I will walks you through the configuration process.

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VMware NSX and Software Defined Data Center

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Network virtualization platform NSX and Software Defined Data Center architecture

IT organizations have gained significant benefits as a direct result of server virtualization. Server consolidation reduced physical complexity, increased operational efficiency and the ability to dynamically re-purpose underlying resources to quickly and optimally meet the needs of increasingly dynamic business applications.
VMware’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) architecture is now extending virtualization technologies across the entire physical data center infrastructure. VMware NSX, the network virtualization platform, is a key product in the SDDC architecture. With NSX, virtualization delivers for networking what it has already delivered for compute and storage

Step By Step NSX Deployment ..more …

 

Arista vEOS in a VM

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Arista Networks was founded to deliver software defined cloud networking solutions for large data center and high-performance computing environments.
Consolidation of what was traditionally three-tier Core/Aggregation/Access designs into two-tier Spine/Leaf designs; fewer tiers decrease cost, complexity, cabling and power/heat.

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Windows 2012 ISCSI Server as a storage device for vSphere 6

Windows 2012 ISCSI Server as a storage device for vSphere

Win2012R2

VMware

You should have a central storage like SAN in order to play with the VMware advance feature like HA, vMotion, FT…Etc, but that is not always possible for Lab or evaluation.

In my previous posts, I showed you how to install and setup HPLeftHand P4000 on ESX and provide a shared storage for VMware.

In this blog I will show you how to use Microsoft windows 2012 ISCSI solution as a shared storage for VMware.

I will not walk you through the step to setup iSCSI Target; if you are interested in step-by-step   iSCSI Target setup take a look in to Microsoft iSCSI Solution.

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Palo Alto as a Virtual machine

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Palo Alto as a Virtual machine

In order to get hands on experience with Palo Alto Firewall, I will walk you through the steps for install and configure PA as a Virtual machine “PA as VM” on your workstation and build your own lab.

In my next post; we’re going to work on scenarios to configure PA

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Arista Networks and Leaf-Spine Architecture

Modern Network infrastructure designed for virtualization and the cloud
“Deploy flatter Two-Tier Network and Leaf-Spine Architecture”

As cloud architectures and multi-tenancy capabilities continue to develop and mature,  here is an economy of scale that can be realized by aggregating resources across applications, business units, and separate corporations to a common shared, yet segmented, infrastructure.

Elasticity, mobility, automation, and density of virtual machines demands new network architectures focusing on high performance, addressing portability, and the innate understanding of the virtual machine as the new building block of the datacenter.

Virtualization technologies from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft encapsulate existing applications, and abstract them from the physical hardware.The network access layer formed by virtual switches is now inside the server.

The characteristics of networks that support virtualization and cloud computing demand that legacy network practices be abandoned in favor of modern cloud networking architectures, flatter two-tier leaf-spine architecture over a legacy, enterprise
three-tier design.

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Single-Root I/O Virtualization

Single-Root I/O Virtualization

SR-IOV is a hardware solution based on PCI-SIG I/O Virtualization (IOV) specifications that is designed to replace the role of software in virtual machine connectivity and leverage hardware features to scale up hosts more, to accelerate performance, to reduce latency,

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Windows 2012 NIC Teams

What is NIC teaming?

It is a group NICs together to act as a single unit.
Some Advantage of NIC Teaming:

Load Balancing When we have two or more NICs, we can distribute and balance the network traffic across each NIC in a team.
Hint: when you team together two 10 GbE NICs, you don’t get a 20 GbE pipe, Instead you get the ability to distribute traffic across two 10 GbE NICs

Failover Services that are important to the business usually have a service-level agreement (SLA) indicating that they must be available to the customer a certain percentage of the time.
To avoid single faulty switch to bring down the entire service by affecting network s availability; it is a Network features like fault-tolerant storage and highly available Hyper-V hosts

There is no need any more for hardware manufacture NIC Team solution, which was not supported by Microsoft.

NIC Team is a feature added to Microsoft windows 2012, and it is hardware independent; that mean you can build NIC team even by using different model, from any manufacturer and can even be of different speeds(not recommended).

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