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VMware Hands-on Labs - HOL-SDC-1319. Introduction Please Read: Many of the modules will have you enter Command Line Interface (CLI) commands. A text file has been placed on the desktop of the environment allowing you to easily copy and paste complex commands or passwords in the associated utility (CMD, Putty, console, etc). Certain characters are often not present on keyboards throughout the world. This text file is also included for keyboard layouts which do not provide those characters. The text file is named kb-input.txt. Note: It will potentially take more than 90 minutes to complete the lab. Thank you and enjoy the labs! Virtualization reaches its full potential when all data center resources -- including networking and networks services -- are virtualized. Network virtualization overcomes this limitation by allowing virtual machines to connect to logical networks rather than attaching directly to physical networking hardware. In this lab you will also get a preview of the new NSX vSwitch for ESXi.

Lab Module List: 1. 2. Keeping It Classless. Networking - The Next Generation Open Compute Hardware: Tried and Tested. Networking Server contributions aren't the only things happening under the Open Compute project. Over the last couple of years a new focus on networking was added. Accton, Alpha Networks, Broadcom, Mellanox and Intel have each released a draft specification of a bare-metal switch to the OCP networking group. The premise of standardized bare-metal switches is simple: you can source standard switch models from multiple vendors, and run the OS of your choosing on it, along with your own management tools like Puppet.

To that end, Facebook created Wedge, a 40G QSFP+ ToR switch together with the Linux-based FBOSS switch operating system to spur development in the switching industry, and, as always, to offer a better value for the price. Facebook Wedge in all its glory Logical structure of the Wedge software stack But in Facebook's leaf-spine network design, you need some heavier core switches as well, connecting all the individual ToR switches to build the datacenter fabric. White Box Switching: Bye Trident II, Hello Cavium XPliant. Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) that produce incumbent profit busting white box switching technology could soon be releasing the next wave of programmable networking based on technology from a silicon company best known for it’s encryption products.

Cavium have released the XPliant chipset which it acquired from a $90m purchase earlier this year. This chipset comes in four flavours varying from 880 Gbps to 3.2 Tbps. This results in devices having 128×25 Gbps switching lanes allowing switches with 32x100GbE, 64x 50/40GbE, or 128x 25/10GbE ports in a single device. The highest speed Cavium device is currently twice the speed of the next highest merchant silicon offering, however merchant vendors will catch up with the speed aspect before too long. Let’s take an ODM switch from the likes of Accton that is currently based on the venerable Trident II chipset. Take something like Cumulus Linux. Trident 2 Chipset and Nexus 9500. Most recently launched data center switches use the Trident 2 chipset, and yet we know almost nothing about its capabilities and limitations.

It might not work at linerate, it might have L3 lookup challenges when faced with L2 tunnels, there might be other unpleasant surprises… but we don’t know what they are, because you cannot get Broadcom’s documentation unless you work for a vendor who signed an NDA. Interestingly, the best source of Trident 2 technical information I found so far happens to be the Cisco Live Nexus 9000 Series Switch Architecture presentation (BRKARC-2222).

Here are a few tidbits I got from that presentation and Broadcom’s so-called datasheet. Number of GE ports. The Trident-2 chipset supports 32 40GE ports with 128 10GE SerDes circuits, so you can split each 40GE port into four independent 10GE ports. Forwarding of small packets is not done at line rate (BRKARC-2222 slide 25). Unified forwarding tables (BRKARC-2222 slide 38). More information.