networking

No VMware NSX Hardware Gateway Support for Cisco

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I find it interesting, as I’m taking my first real steps into the world of VMware NSX, that there is no Cisco equipment supported as a VMware NSX hardware gateway (VTEP). According to the HCL on March 13th, 2018 there is a complete lack of “Cisco” in the “Partner” category: I wonder how that works out for Cisco UCS customers. As I continue to remind vendors, virtualization environments cannot virtualize everything. There are still dependencies on things like DNS, DHCP, NTP, and AD that need a few physical servers. There will also always be a few hosts that can’t be virtualized because of vendor requirements, politics, and/or fear. Any solution for a virtual environment needs to help take care of those …

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SDN Industry Analysis

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Tip of the hat to Ivan Pepelnjak over at ipSpace.net — a welcome three minute distraction this afternoon. Enjoy.

VMware vSphere, LLDP, and Juniper EX Switches

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One of the vSphere environments I support uses Juniper EX4200 switches for networking. Juniper switches don’t support Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP). I love CDP because I can tell exactly what switch & port I’m attached to, and see other information like VLANs, etc. CDP removes a lot of human error from our operations, too. I love it for situations like when two cables are mysteriously labeled as heading to the same switch port or I’m sitting at my desk and I need to refer to a physical port 200 miles north of me. It also means that I don’t need to maintain a document of the switch ports, I can script a dump of the information if I need an …

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Four Things VMware Engineering Can Give Me For Christmas

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I hope everybody out there in the virtualization world is having a great holiday season this year! My religion celebrates Christmas, and these are four things I’d love to see under my Christmas tree this year. 1. IPv6 support at all levels of the VMware stack. For a cloud vendor that fancies themselves as forward-looking, not to mention trying to be the “VMware of Networking,” the lack of IPv6 is pretty embarrassing. I know, I know, the tired argument is that nobody is really looking at IPv6. Well, it’s hard to look at when your vendor doesn’t support it much. 🙂 Chicken, meet egg. This would also help ameliorate the fact that VMware products need an awful lot of IPs …

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How To Disable Teredo IPv6 Tunneling in Microsoft Windows

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Greg Ferro’s post about how Microsoft Teredo is a suboptimal networking solution made me think it’s time to update my old post on how to disable Teredo in Windows 7 and in Windows 8. For the record, I agree — I’ve had serious problems with it conflicting with my native IPv6 connectivity. 1. Open a command prompt with administrator privileges (Start->Accessories->right click on Command Prompt, choose Run as Administrator): 2. Issue the command: netsh interface teredo set state disabled 3. You may need to reboot, depending on your version of Windows. If you wish to re-enable Teredo at some point you can issue the command: netsh interface teredo set state type=default