Posts in 2017
-
Understanding the IoT Protocols: MQTT, CoAP, ZigBee
Wednesday, February 01, 2017 in Playing Smart
[In collaboration with the guest blogger, Marc Espinosa] Let’s start with the messaging protocols, MQTT and CoAP, and consider which of the following open standard protocols should be considered for your implementation. If you’re looking …
Posts in 2016
-
Which SDN solution is the right one for me? NSX vs ACI vs Nuage vs Contrail
Wednesday, December 21, 2016 in Playing Smart
This is a question I’ve been getting A LOT in the last few years, and even though it sounds rather simple, somehow it gets really complex to convince all the parties (Developers, Systems/Virtualization and Network engineers and the CEO/CTO) why …
-
Cisco ACI and OpenStack Integration: RedHat vs Mirantis
Thursday, April 21, 2016 in Virtualization and Private Cloud
Note: This post requires basic knowledge of Cisco ACI architecture and ACI logical elements, as well as understanding of what OpenStack is, what the OpenStack elements (Projects) do, and the principles of what OVS and Neutron are and how they work. …
-
Cisco ACI and OpenStack Integration: RedHat vs Mirantis
Thursday, April 21, 2016 in SDN and Network Virtualization
Note: This post requires basic knowledge of Cisco ACI architecture and ACI logical elements, as well as understanding of what OpenStack is, what the OpenStack elements (Projects) do, and the principles of what OVS and Neutron are and how they work. …
-
Cisco ACI Service Graph (L4-7), ADC: F5 vs NetScaler
Thursday, April 21, 2016 in SDN and Network Virtualization
Note: This post requires basic knowledge of Cisco ACI architecture and ACI logical elements, as well as understanding of what ADC is, and the basic principles of Load Balancing and SSL. If you wish to get more information about these technologies, …
-
Cisco ACI Guide for Humans, Part 2: Upgrade Cisco ACI
Wednesday, February 17, 2016 in SDN and Network Virtualization
First time we “unpack” ACI, we will find a certain number of potential Spine and potential Leaf switches, and hopefully 3 (or 5) APIC Controllers. We will rack the entire fabric, interconnect every Spine to every Leaf with a single 40G cable, and …
-
Cisco ACI Guide for Humans, Part 1: Physical Connectivity
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 in SDN and Network Virtualization
First of all, I need to explain why I decided to write such a post. It’s quite simple to everyone who ever tried to Deploy/Configure/Understand how Cisco ACI works using the official Cisco Documentation. Cisco ACI is a very powerful …
Posts in 2015
-
SDN Wars: Cisco ACI vs VMware NSX
Tuesday, December 22, 2015 in Playing Smart
In the last few years, with an exponential growth of interest in the SDDC (Software Defined Data Center), many vendors have shown an interest, and some have even managed to engineer a more-or-less decent SDN (Software Defined Networking) solution. …
-
Cisco ACI: AVS and Hypervisor Integration
Thursday, December 17, 2015 in SDN and Network Virtualization
At this point I will assume that you already read my previous posts about: Cisco ACI Fundamentals. Application Network Profiles, Contracts and Outside World connection. If you did, then great. We may proceed with the “cool” stuff, such as …
-
Cisco ACI: Application Network Profiles, Contracts and ACI Connection to the Outside Network
Thursday, December 17, 2015 in SDN and Network Virtualization
By know you should know the following facts about ACI: Cisco Nexus 9k Switches make the ACI Fabric, which is the Control and the Data plane of ACI Architecture. The main components of the ACI Architecture are Bridge Domain (BD), EPG (End Point …