One major advantage to NSX-T is that Edge Transport Nodes (ETNs) are transitive Transitivity (Wikipedia) (Consortium GARR) is an extremely important concept in network science, and in computer networking. In simple terms, a network node (any speaker capable of transmitting or receiving on a network) can have the …

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Continuous Delivery: No Rest for the Wicked Now that we have: A method to generate Desired State Configurations, by defining Declaratively what the device config should be, and combining it with what a device config should have A method to apply configurations automatically, without PuTTY Copy-Pasting We now can …

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Don't Reinvent the Wheel: Ansible Playbooks Writing your own code isn't always the answer Often, communities such as Python will contribute code of substantially higher quality than what you/I can create individually. This is OK. In nearly every case, dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist programmers will consume …

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BGP Advantages in Virtualized Networking BGP is more like an Application BGP, by design, is a lot more capable than most typical routing protocols. Here are a few ways MP-BGP/BGPv4 is fundamentally unique: Extensible: MP-BGP can store and run multiple address families (AFIs) and subsequent address families (SAFIs). …

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As is probably obvious from the sidebar, I'm pretty enthusiastic about IPv6 - for quite a few reasons, not least of which is implementing a new Layer 3 protocol after guys like Vint Cerf already did most of the cool stuff. However, I didn't want to simply complete this task - most people complete all of these tasks …

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Let's answer the big question: "What's the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything?" Kidding, it's easier to cover the question: "Why automate?" So let's get started! Here I'm going to start a few easy and quick ways to benefit from automation, with a slight networking …

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I have mentioned in a previous blog post that I'm not using any ACLs on my tunnel broker VM This is usually pretty bad, but again, we can get those protections outside of the VM - I'm using this to prove out how NSX-T can provide utility in this situation. Solution Overview VyOS is a fantastic platform, with a ton of …

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First off, let's cover what's been built so far: To set up an anycast vIP in NSX-T after standing up your base infrastructure (already depicted and configured), all you have to do is stand up a load balanced vIP at multiple sites. NSX-T takes care of the rest. Here's how: Create a new load balancing pool. Create a new …

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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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Datacenter Network Engineers have two problems: CHANGE LOOPS (let's cover this one later!) Change is everywhere. Emerging trends such as DevOps and/or CI/CD have created the need for dynamic, ephemeral allocation of data center resources; not only in large-scale deployments, but medium-sized companies are starting down …

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