So I decided to take a deep dive into eVPN, I’ll mostly be looking into VLAN-aware bundling, as per RFC 7432 – and mostly because I think this will fit more closely, with the types of deployments most of the customers are used to – good old IRB interfaces and bridge-tables!

As everyone knows, VPLS has been available for many years now and it’s pretty widely deployed, most of the customers I see have some flavour of VPLS configured on their networks and use it to good effect – so why eVPN? what’s the point in introducing a new technology if the current one appears to work fine.

The reality is that multipoint layer-2 VPNs (VPLS) were never quite as polished as layer-3 VPNs, when layer-3 VPNs were first invented they became, and still are the in many cases the “go to” technology for layer-3 connectivity across MPLS networks, and…

We’ve been hoodwinked. They snookered us. The wool has done been pulled over our eyes. Ah yes, the snake oil convention came to town, and we all went in the big tent and bought us some. But who could blame us for getting all sparkly-eyed when you breathe in the aroma of those fat numbers promised by 802.11ac? It’s intoxicating stuff, this getting-ever-faster Wi-Fi. But alas… it’s also fraudulent promises, broken hearts, and “Ha! Made you look!” all put in a shit sandwich that we’re willingly nibbling on.

OK- so maybe it’s not quite that bad. But it’s safe to say that with 802.11ac, and even 802.11n, the standards-authors are writing certain checks that the Bank of Reality just can’t cash, despite the giddy marketing folks’ best efforts to convince us otherwise.

Have I bummed you out yet? You might be wondering what could put an upbeat, good-looking fella like myself in this sort…

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.

So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?

Being a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it:

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a…

The lack of support for running layer 3 routing protocols over vPC on the Nexus 7000 is well documented – less well known however is that the Nexus 5500 platform operates in a slightly different way which does actually allow layer 3 routing over vPC for unicast traffic. Some recent testing and subsequent discussions with one of my colleagues on this topic reminded me that there is still (somewhat understandably) a degree of confusion around this.

Let’s start with a reminder of what doesn’t work on the Nexus 7000: