I am trying to get my company’s session approved for this year’s VMWorld. When you aren’t a Platinum sponsor, it is a little bit more difficult to get these things pushed though. So, I am asking for help from anyone who has a VMWorld account to go and vote for the session. Many of you have been asking me what Nicira is up to. This session is a great way to find out. Here are the session details and link to cast your vote.
Cast your vote here
Title: Reworking the Network to Support Today’s Virtualization & Cloud Demands
Speaker: Martin Casado, Nicira CTO and Founder
Company: Nicira
Session Id: PC8430
Abstract: “The networking industry is lagging far behind the virtualization trends which are transforming our datacenters into pure resource pools of compute power. Traditional approaches to networking hamper the adoption of virtualization with scaling and mobility limitations, vendor lock-in on hardware platforms & management APIs, and an inability to seamlessly bridge physical and virtual topologies. This session will review a networking architecture that offer the guarantees of the physical network, while retaining the flexibility of the cloud. Solutions will be described which tackle problems such as providing strict isolation, bridging physical networks, providing accurate SLAs and billing information, and offering inter-subnet migration with persistent IP addresses. In this talk, real world experiences designing & building multi-tenant virtual networking infrastructures which scale to hundreds of thousands of virtual machines and tens of thousands of tenants will also be discussed. “
As the deployment of 10G switches gains traction, the case studies, 3rd party “independent” test and rebuttals are flowing like mad. I thought Omar Sultan from Cisco did a very good job with this one (rebuttal to a recently published Network World article) in particular in making the case that while 0-60MPH testing is certainly interesting, the majority of us drive on highways, back roads, traffic jams, parking lots, bridges, tunnels, and a variety of other places which require our cars to be good in a lot of different scenarios, not just on the drag strip (although, as a amateur track enthusiast, I love taking off fast).
http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/comments/the_perils_of_equipment_testing/
Net-net, network devices need to be able to perform well in a variety of scenarios, not just on the drag strip. A test drive is the only way to determine if a “car” is right for you.
Now that the VMware ESX vSphere 4.0 U1 update has been released, customers are moving from 3.0 and 3.5 to 4.0 at a very accelerated pace. U1 means that the technology is stable, the kinks have been worked out and gremlins have moved on to terrorize something else. It is also a major mental barrier (like Service Packs in the Windows world). Now that the barrier has been removed, there are a lot more fact and experience based analysis coming from users championing for and against new features and solutions inside of the vSphere 4 offering.
A great example of this is captured over at Search Networking comparing 2 separate articles. The first, by Bob Plankers (lead Linux and VMware systems engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he also runs The Lone Sysadmin blog) is why the VMware vSwitch is good enough for most. The 2nd, by David Davis (a virtualization author), does a good job of articulating the why the Benefits outweigh the extra cost of Cisco Nexus 1000V.
In addition to David points, I would add one point of clarification which Bob might not be aware of. The Nexus 1000V is sold and serviced through both VMware and Cisco. In fact, VMW offers a couple of bundles of the Nexus 1000V with the vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses (both full license and upgrade license). When VMW sells the Nexus 1000V with the vSphere software, they also sell support (in conjunction with the vSphere support). Both the VMW and Cisco support teams are trained on the Nexus 1000V at the same time and both equally capable of handling support issues. And if things get really tricky, the Cisco TAC backs up VMW’s support organization with a direct line into our engineering department.
Oh, one other thing. The latest release of the Nexus 1000V software (1.2) includes a simple GUI to allow you to complete the initial config in about 7 minutes. There is a VOD posted here to show just how easy it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sxWiz7S-z0
It is great to see more real world analysis from real users. Looking forward to reading more of these in the future.
Check out the Brighttalk Virtualized Data Center Webcast this Thursday….lots of good topics including mine on the Nexus 1000V!
http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/8134/attend
