I’m a big fan of Juniper Networks! I work mainly with the SSG (ScreenOS) and SRX (Junos) series. The Juniper SRX is a network security solution, which can be positioned in the data center or at the branch. You will surely agree, that virtualization and cloud computing changed a lot from the network perspective. This demands security solutions that are not bound to hardware boundaries. Juniper Firefly Perimeter addresses this demands.
The PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) is a very handy application when dealing with the PowerShell. And because of this, the ISE is also a very handy application when dealing with VMware PowerCLI. When I write a script or a one-liner, one of the first things I do is to load the necessary snap-ins. And because I’m lazy, I’m trying to automate everything, what I have to do more than once.
While talking with a colleague, she told me that she would like to know more about NetApp. Unfortunately we don’t have a NetApp system in our lab and playing with customer equipment is… mmh…unfavorable. But there’s a solution for this problem: Simulate ONTAP 8. This software allows you to simulate a 7-Mode or Cluster-Mode (c-Mode) system and to test many of the features. All you need is a VMware Workstation/ Player/ Fusion or an ESXi host.
This is a really short post. A first step can be the configuration of CIFS. This is done using “cifs setup” command. After you’ve setup CIFS, you can create volumes and qtrees, you can share them with you Windows server etc. It’s a good start into your Data ONTAP 8 journey.
The requirements All you need is a configured ONTAP 8 simulator instance and a Windows Domain Controller with Active Directory.
One possible use case for the HP VSR1000 is to build IPsec tunnels for secure data transfer. In this post I will show you how to configure a IPsec tunnel between two HP VSR1000. If you need a short introduction, feel free to take a look at this article.
The experimental setup We have two server VMs (in this case Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1) and two HP VSR1000 Virtual Service Router.
This morning a tweet from Josh Coen (VCDX #129) shocked me a bit:
VCP certifications now appear to have an expiration date associated with them #vmware
— Josh Coen (@joshcoen) March 8, 2014 So far the VMware certification had no expiration date. If you had a VCP for ESX2, this was still valid up to today. I quickly checked my VMware Training account and noticed a tiny exclamation mark above my certifications.
Today I found this neat PowerCLI One-liner in my Twitter timeline:
PowerCLI Einzeiler um den Adapter-Typ einer VM auf Vmxnet3 zu ändern: Get-VM YOUR-VM |Get-NetworkAdapter |Set-NetworkAdapter -Type "Vmxnet3"
— T. Scheller (@bones44) February 28, 2014 A nice side effect of this one-liner is, that the mac-address doesn’t change, as you can see in the screenshots.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
If you have ever changed the adapter type of a vNIC you will know, that this leads to a changed mac-address and a new adapter in the OS.
Nutanix was founded in 2009 and left the stealth mode in 2011. Their Virtual Computing Platform combines storage and computing resources in a building block scheme. Each appliance consists up to four nodes and local storage (SSD and rotating rust). At least three nodes are necessary to form a cluster. If you need more storage or compute resources, you can add more appliances, and thus nodes, to the cluster (scale out).
In an earlier blog post I wrote a bit about virtual service routers. Now I want to show you how easily you can deploy a virtual service router in your lab. To do so I have downloaded the the HP VSR1000 Virtual Service Router and the Cisco Cloud Service Router 1000V. If you want to know how to download them, just read the mentioned blog post. Because both virtual service routers delivered as OVA, I can easily deploy them through the vSphere Client (sorry, no Web Client.
Today you can get nearly everything as a virtual appliance. So even a router. Usually virtual router appliances are used for the same purposes as physical router: Connecting different networks. A router is nothing more then a piece of hardware and software. Due to this fact a router can be easily deployed as a virtual appliance. So where do you find router typically? In you datacenter? Yes, but in a datacenter you will deal typically with layer-3 switches rather than a classical router.
