Have you ever heard someone say "I'm not a coder" at work? The IT industry is changing again. Our humble origins began as polymaths moved from adjacent industries and created a new world from scratch. The pioneering phase led to unique opportunities, creating our transport protocols, programming languages, …

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CI/CD tools aren't just for automatically deploying apps! Jenkins excels at enabling an engineer to automatically execute and test code - but, it has a hidden super-power: Automating boring and intensive IT tasks(removing toil). Let's take a common and relatable IT problem - it doesn't matter if you're a DevOps …

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Reliably executing repetitive tasks with automation is easy (after the work is done) Given enough work, self-built automation can be easy to consume. Non-consumers (engineers) need to focus on reliability and repeatability, but occasionally there's an opportunity to save time and simplify lives directly. Information …

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VMware introduced the ability to double-encapsulate layer 2 frames in via the "Access VLAN" option for VRF instances in NSX Data Center: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX-T-Data-Center/3.2/administration/GUID-4CB5796A-1CED-4F0E-ADE0-72BF7B3F762C.html Q-in-VNI provides a capable infrastructure engineer the …

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VMware's vDS is a bit of a misnomer In a previous post, I covered the concept of transitivity in networking - but in Layer 2 (Ethernet) land, transitivity is critically important to understanding how VMware's Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS) works. The statement "VMware's Virtual Distributed Switch is not a …

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Spanning Tree is the all-important loop prevention method for Layer 2 topologies and source of ire to network engineers worldwide. Usually IT engineers list the Dunning-Kruger Effect in a negative context, depicting an oblivious junior or an unaware manager, but I like to focus on the opposite end of the curve with …

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Ever wonder what it would be like to have a platform dedicated to Continuous Improvement / Testing / Labbing? Cisco's put a lot of thought into good ways to do that, and Cisco Modeling Labs(CML) is the latest iteration of their solutions to provide this as a service to enterprises and casual users alike. CML is the …

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VMware's NSX Datacenter product is designed for a bit more than single enterprise virtual networking and security. When reviewing platform maximums (NSX-T 3.2 ConfigMax), the listed maximum number of Tier-1 routers is 4,000 logical routers. Achieving that number takes a degree of intentional design, however. When …

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Have you ever wondered what happened to all the privately-addressed traffic coming from any home network? Well, if it isn't explicitly blocked by the business, it's routed, and this is not good. Imagine what data leakage can occur when a user mistypes a destination IP - the traffic goes out to the Service Provider, who …

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GitOps GitOps, a term coined in 2017, describes the practice of performing infrastructure operations from a Git repository. In this practice, we easily develop the ability to re-deploy any broken infrastructure (like application managers), but that doesn't really help infrastructure engineers. From the perspective of …

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