Since most of NSX-T runs in a firewall mode of sorts, it's probably worthwhile to discuss on of the less well-known routing protocol features - Graceful Restart. As published for BGP, IETF RFC 4724 outlines a mechanism for "preserving forwarding traffic during a BGP restart." This definition may be a little …

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Now that the primary infrastructure components for NSX-T are in place, it is now possible to build-out the actual functions that NSX-T is designed to provide. A friendly suggestion, make sure your Fabric is healthy before doing this: NSX-T differs from NSX-V quite a bit here. Irregular topologies between edge routers …

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Since NSX-T 2.5 just came out, it's about time to do a full rebuild and getting started guide. NSX-T differs greatly from NSX-V in that the initial setup is quite a bit more complicated and doesn't have many guardrails or direct paths to initial set-up. We'll be skipping the appliance deployment, because if you have …

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With the previous post, I covered traditional data center networking, and some of the reliability compromises made to accommodate typical workloads. Here I'll be outlining my take as a series of blog posts on the next iteration of data center network design, Spine and Leaf: Lab Diagram What came before Introduction: …

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Now that NSX-T Datacenter 2.5 is downloadable, it's time to try this out in my home lab. First things first, if you log in more than 90 days out, you'll be locked out of the appliance completely. If you make any changes the normal linux way (passwd and chage) the appliance will automatically revert it in about a …

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As of 19 September 2019, NSX-T 2.5 has been officially released and is available for download! It's been a bit since the announcement, so let's cover some of the new capabilities of interest with NSX-T 2.5. This is a summary of what I found interesting, the complete release notes are here NSX Intelligence VMWare will …

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So far, this is all great, but it IS missing something Networks are useless unless you do something with it. In most cases, a device (in this case, we'll use a server) needs to connect via redundant links to a common Layer 2 segment. Why is this? Well, most servers are incapable of dynamic routing. Instead, the server …

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So far, all examples to date have been extremely simple, and stand rather well on their own (OSPF Clos would work just FINE in a campus network if you have cheap L3) but may not effectively address some more advanced use cases. In short, we're about to enter niche territory. Generally speaking, BGP is regarded as the …

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Overview First off, here's the reference diagram (YAML): Assumptions about difficulty Most people I've met outside of the carrier space are pretty intimidated by BGP, as it is truly impressive in scope. Here, we're going to break-out BGP usage into two categories: iBGP: This is where all nodes have the same Autonomous …

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Here's the example topology used in the Spine-and-Leaf labs: (YAML)

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