Heavy Networking | May 20, 2016 Sponsored
Show 289: Hutto School District Puts VMware NSX To The Test (Sponsored)
Ethan
Banks
Greg
Ferro
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On today’s show, sponsored by VMware, we talk to a VMware NSX customer to get their real-life experiences with the technology. And just to make it more interesting, this customer also uses Cisco ACI, which we’ll get into.
Our guests come from the Hutto Independent School District. Based in Hutto, TX, the district has over 6,000 K-12 students on 8 campuses.
We talk about why Hutto went down the path of choosing NSX, how the technology supports Hutto’s VDI implementation, the business aspects of the decision to go with NSX, how they deployed NSX themselves, and more.
Joining Greg and Ethan are Travis L Brown, Director of Technology; Keith Reynolds, Network Administrator; and Christopher Harding, Network Administrator.
Show Notes:
- What you are you looking for from NSX in the future?
- What did NSX bring to your environment that you did not expect?
- How has NSX impacted your operational flow?
- With NSX installed, did you use it as anticipated?
- How did the installation process go? Did you do it yourself, or outsource?
- What problems were you trying to solve with NSX?
- Give us an overview of your network and user population
- Active/Active DHCP cluster design behind NSX load balancer
- Adding manageability to your VDI environment – broadcast suppression feature
- Cisco ACI – needed to replace old gear, looked at 9K with ACI fabric spread over multiple locations “ACI as DCI” (leaf-spine spread over 2 locations, 160Gbps between, NSX over the top)
- Deployment time for actual networking
- Future of DC architecture (distributed, no DR, etc.)
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Interesting podcast guys, great to see what a “can do”-attitude can accomplish (without having to rely on vendors and such).
Would have been nice to get a bit more technical about how they used NSX (ELR, DLR and so on) or how did they solve VMotion-sickness uhm I mean VMotion challenges like stretched layer 2 domains or IP-mobility.
During the show Greg mentioned something about a company with 1000 employees running all it’s IT on 8 servers (reminds me a bit of Ivan’s famous “all you need is two switches” blog) which might also be a good subject for a podcast?
Good podcast. As a retired Network Administrator I would add that NSX might be a better solution than Acura’s NSX.
I just started listening to your wonderful podcasts a couple months ago, and to my delight and amusement happened across this show. I myself work for a very large ISP that handles many E-RATE customer circuits and as delicious irony would have it live about 10 minutes from the city of Hutto where these fine gentlemen are doing what it seems they do best. It was an absolute pleasure to hear about the positives that are going on and the valuable feedback taking place between a end user large enough to provide direct vendor feedback, without being too large as is in my organizations’s case where change often has a very high moment of inertia and takes forever to get that ball rolling.
Getting to hear a little bit about the other side of where many of my “simple” layer 2 pipes land, at many sites and ISD data centers just like these was a rare treat. I just wish I could drive up there and ask these guys for a tour now as they have peaked my interest and will have to delve a little more into learning what NSX is capable of now just for myself after hearing this!