Sunday, January 27, 2013

Inter Data Center Workload Mobility with VMware

Server virtualization has increasing become implemented in the data center because it enables higher utilization of physical servers increasing their value to the organization. By abstracting the server operating system from the server hardware, virtualization allows physical resources to be shared among many virtual machines. The capabilities of cloning, suspending, and migrating live VMs among a cluster of physical hosts enhances resiliency and performance of applications. Advancements in networking technology allow servers within a single cluster to be located across the entire data center, or in another data center some distance away, further enhancing application availability, but making this technology work isn’t simple.

The Case for Live Migration
There are may use cases put forward for live workload migration and they are covered in the document, and were also covered in my previous blog “Making the Case for Long Distance Virtual Machine Mobility.” These use cases include optimizing server resource utilization, optimizing resource consumption at various locations, hybrid cloud where overflow workloads move to another data center, and disaster avoidance were workloads are moved to saftey, as well as a follow the sun model where workloads move according to the time zone of users. Some scenarios for data center migration for live workloads can be accomplished without implementing complicated first-hop-responder and route-optimization techniques. Other scenarios are possible however, they require implementing protocols that share state and fate, thereby increasing the complexity and reducing the reliability of the connected data centers. As a result of these considerations the network is a critical factor.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Integrating SRX Security Services with QFabric in the Data Center

The data center is a concentrated deployment environment for networking equipment, consisting of thousands of servers that are accessed by tens of thousands of client systems. The need for large-scale access creates a complex set of data flows to business applications that must be protected. Determining firewall deployment configurations and sizing in a data center is a considerable effort and firewall performance is critical to handle the volume of connections per second, and sustained connections. To address these challenges, Juniper Networks created a new class of security products, the SRX Series Services Gateways, to provide the ability to scale in the data center.

Implementation Guide for the SRX in the Data Center
To help customers deploy the SRX Juniper has created an implementation guide that provides various design considerations and implementation guidelines to deploy firewall services in a Juniper QFabric switch-based data center. The guide is intended for architects, network engineers and operators, and those who require technical knowledge regarding integrating the SRX Series with QFabric technology. The guide reviews the technical concepts of the SRX Series Services Gateways related to design and implementation of firewall services. Deployment scenarios are based on a single logical switch design using the Qfabric.