A couple of colleagues of mine wrote a  document on live Workload Mobility and Disaster Recovery for Tier-1 applications.   I think you should check it out and here’s a couple of key points that I want to highlight:

1. A single physical Cisco, EMC, VMware infrastructure
2. Both vMotion and SRM validated on same infrastructure
3. Tier-1 Enterprise Applications tested

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Tags: Business Continuance, Cisco, DCI, disaster recovery, EMC, LISP, Microsoft Sharepoint, mobility, Oracle 11g, OTV, RecoverPoint, Replication, SRM, Tier 1 Applications, vMotion, VMware, VPLEX, VPLEX Metro, Workload Mobility

I previously discussed using LISP to optimize your client-server traffic so today I’ll discuss the reverse direction: Egress Path Optimization from the Server to the Client. Let’s go over the need for Path Optimization in the direction from Server-to-Client with some pictures and explanations.

The Virtual Machine (VM) server is configured with a default gateway IP address, 192.168.1.1, which is the next hop IP address that the VM will forward packets towards as the traffic returns to the client outside the data center.  In this data center environment, we’ve deployed the default gateway using the First Hop Redundancy Protocol (FHRP).  In reality, FHRP is an umbrella technology term that includes Hot Standby Routing Protcol (HSRP) and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), two main technologies that provide transparent failover and redundancy at the first hop IP router.  Please see info on FHRP here.

Also notice that the VM default gateway is the same as the HSRP Virtual IP Address (VIP). The HSRP VIP binds itself to one of the physical HSRP Routers via an HSRP election process using Layer 2 control packets between the two physical HSRP Routers and this means that the VM default gateway, since it points to a VIP, may move between physical HSRP Routers, and of course which is then intent and design when using any type of FHRP.

In the above picture, the Path is Optimized from Server to Client, so now let’s take a look at what happens when we migrate the VM to the new data center.

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Tags: cloud, data center, Data Center Interconnect, DCI, FHRP, HSRP, LISP, mobility, N7K, Nexus 7000, OTV, vMotion, Workload Mobility

Update: LISP solves the problem from client to server, IE Ingress Path Optimization.  FHRP solves the problem from server to client, IE Egress Path Optimization.  You can check out Egress Path Optimization here.

We recently published a Data Center Interconnect -- DCI-  related document on cisco.com and I wanted to get it in front of you.  Locator/Identifier Separator Protoc0l -- LISP -- provides the path optimization technology to forward transactions via the most direct path, ultimately meaning better application performance. The link for the LISP Virtual Machine Mobility paper is below.

As a side note, LISP can be used many other ways and here’s a pointer to one of  our LISP pages.

For our purposes in DCI, we use LISP for path optimization and we can see here why the  need arises. The box on the left shows an existing transaction that looks pretty direct.  The middle box shows the workload is now in a new data center but the transaction is suboptimal, it still goes through the firsts data center.  The box on the right shows the desired path, the direct path from user to workload withouth going through the first data center.  It’s pretty easy to see the need here for path optimization and the desire to have the direct path to the new data center location as shown on the far right box.

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Tags: Disaster Planning, disaster recovery, LISP, LISP ASM, LISP ESM, Virtual Machine Mobility, vMotion

Hey folks--this is the second of three posts looking a little more closely at VXLAN.  If you missed the first post, you can find it here.  In this installment we are going to look at the some of the other options out there.  Two of the most common questions we see are  ”why do I need yet another protocol?” and “can I now get rid of X?”  This should help you answer these questions.So, let’s dig in… Read More »

Tags: data center, LISP, OTV, virtualization, VXLAN

Today’s IT organizations face a broad set of challenges today.

• How to deal with the proliferation of end-user devices? (smartphones, tablets, etc.)
• How to deal with the proliferation of virtualization and it’s new operational model?
• How to adapt to requirement for new application traffic patterns (east-west, VM mobility)?
• How to manage the edges of their networks as work/life locations blur?
• When do they decide to deliver a business need via internal resources vs. external resources?
• With all this technology change happening so rapidly, how do they align their teams?

Tags: Big Data, Cisco UCS, Cloud Computing, Cloud-Ready Network, Consolidation, FabricPath, Hadoop, LISP, nexus, OTV, virtualization