Tag: cisco

Again I made it to the list of Cisco Champions, making this the second year in a row!

I am so glad that my effort to give back to the community and to all my networking fellows out there paid off again in the shape of this recognition from Cisco. This badge is only a small thing, relating to all the community connections and sharing that my involvement with networking community via social media and this blog, made possible. It only pushes me to get even more done in the future.

In 2018 I was involved in a few very challenging new projects, working with Cisco ACI and VMware NSX, and basically studying and researching continuously in order to get to know the products as much as it was possible, it resulted in not being so active on my blog or twitter this year.

I just received an e-mail from Cisco with the notice that I was elected Cisco Champion for 2018.

As Cisco says:

“Cisco Champions are a group of highly influential technical experts who generously enjoy sharing their knowledge, expertise, and thoughts on the social web and with Cisco. The Cisco Champion program encompasses a diverse set of areas such as Data Center, Internet of Things, Enterprise Networks, Collaboration, and Security. Cisco Champions are located all over the world.”

I must say that last 7 years of writing this blog was the primary reason why one should pick me for this flattering badge.

I’m following some of the most active Cisco Champions on Twitter for years.

In SSM, Source-Specific Multicast, things are done differently from standard multicast forwarding. SSM is specifying a group of hosts that are receiving same multicast stream using group IP address and additionally using stream unicast source IP.

In this article it is shown how to configure Source Specific Multicast on Cisco and Juniper equipment.

In standard multicast, forwarding is done using group IP address which is an IP from multicast dedicated range 224.0.0.0/4 (224.0.0.0 – 239.255.255.255) or FF00::/8 in IPv6. Each multicast group IP address is a single address which specifies all hosts receiving a specific stream, streamed towards that group IP address from multicast source. In standard multicast everybody can start to stream with some IP multicast group IP, becoming in that way, the multicast source.

…There’s a nice little pdf to get you through

HP is aware that most of networking engineers start their learning process in Cisco Networking Academy. Is is a normal course of events if you want to learn networking. Cisco has the very best study materials and best, carefully developed syllabus that is both high quality and most detailed in the world of networking. Not to mention the high reputation that engineers get with Cisco certificates standing by their names.

On the other hand, when you take an average mid-size business customer today you will probably see that he is mostly concerned about the price and not so much about the feature-set and robustness of IT equipment. And there you have your situation in which customer decides to go with HP rather than Cisco gear in their communication closet.

Virtualisation

In a world in which every day I hear virtualization at least 50 times it would be very strange that there is some part of our digital environment which is not yet virtualised. Today we can see that almost every piece of our server equipment is going to the cloud hence is being virtualised. That is not a new story, server virtualisation i basically existing for decades now. Todays story is about next step in the virtualization process. There is finally a big desire to do the same thing with networking equipment. That’s obviously the way to go as there are more and more server on one hypervisor or on one cluster in the data centers and that implies that would be too expensive to implement any kind of hardware networking devices for each virtual server instance. And that implies that we are living in a world where switches and routers are more and more becoming part of different virtualisation host kernels or hypervisors.

But now when that virtualization technology is basically a normal way of deploying almost all machines and there is nothing standing in between network devices virtualization and us why there is no way to use that technology and make for us a virtualized modeling tool for network design and troubleshooting to?

GNS3 vs VIRL

Yes, there is GNS3 for years now but to be sincere, I tried to use if for some design and troubleshooting sessions and it is so time-consuming to set everything to work right that is was at the end easier to do it on a piece of paper.