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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There are numerous advantages to deploying an internal root CA to an enterprise: Autonomy: Enterprises can control how their certificates are issued, structured, and revoked independently of a third party. Slow or fast replacement cycles are permissible if you control the infrastructure, letting you customize the CA to …

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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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What is the point of all this software-defined infrastructure if you don't use it? In prior examples, it's a fairly straightforward path to SDN when deploying NSX Data Center, allowing a VI admin or network engineer to deploy virtual network resources via a GUI. This isn't the end of an effort, but the start of a …

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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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Idempotence and Declarative Methods - not just buzzwords Idempotence Coined by Benjamin Peirce, this term indicates that a mathematical operation will produce a consistent result, even with repetition. Idempotence is much more complicated subject in mathematics and computer science. IT and DevOps use a simplified …

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**Note: This feature has been deprecated by VMware The Jetstreams Cloud operators now provide two completely different classes of service to customers: Self-Service, VMs, Operating System Templates Generally mature, some private cloud operators are smoothing out CMPs or such, but work as intended from a customer …

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Note: This feature has been deprecated by VMware NSX-T 3.2 has been released, and has a ton of spiffy features. The NSX ALB integration is particularly neat, but while repeatedly (repeatably) breaking the integration to learn more about it, I ran into this error: When deploying NSX ALB appliances from the NSX Manager, …

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Have you seen this selector when building machines on vSphere? This causes some fairly common issues in NOS VMs, as most don't really know what distribution the NOS is based on. "Guest OS Version" doesn't just categorize your workload, though. Selecting "Other Linux" instructs vSphere to maximize …

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