Episode 11 – Infrastructure Lifecycle

We returned to record our eleventh episode on Sunday August 28, 2016.

Interesting News and Events

• VMworld 2016 Las Vegas
• NASA sacks HPE support – NASA’s ‘act of desperation’ demonstrates continued cyber deficiencies by Jason Miller
• Networking Field Day 12 – 41 videos available on YouTube

Roundtable Discussion – Infrastructure Lifecycle

Reasons for a refresh?

• End of Life (EoL)
• End of Support (EoS)
• Performance
• Expansion
• Budgeting (new equipment might be less costly than maintaining older equipment under maintenance contracts)
• New features requirement (PoE+ vs PoE / 10Gbps vs 1Gbps / 1Gbps vs 100Mbps)
• Manageability

Strategic Lifecycle Planning – often companies plan and budget to replace their infrastructure every 5 – 7 years.

What kind of refresh ?

• The easy one; 1:1 like e.g. one core switch for a newer cores witch
• Technology change; like e.g. from classic STP to multi chassis link aggregation
• Fabrics
• Software Defined Networking

You can really stretch the budget by looking at second hand equipment, especially for non-critical sections of the infrastructure. Avoid grey market equipment and only work with a reputable vendor.

Reach out for the Vendors:

• Educate yourself before the vendors show up
• Compare different vendors and technologies with each other
• Document the features that you are looking for in the solution
• Proof of Concept – prove out the possible solution
• Rollout Planning
• Maintenance window – new product gets implemented to the production environment
• Finger crossed (look for bugs)

What tools are you using?

Synergy – Synergy combines your desktop devices together into one cohesive experience. It’s software for sharing your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk. It works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It’s only $10 for the basic version and well worth the money in Dominik’s opinion.

Michael’s technical challenge?

These past two weeks I’ve been working to figure out why the Lenovo ThinkPad T460 w/Intel AC 8260 wireless adapter wasn’t playing well with a Cisco 5508 Wireless LAN Controller and Cisco 1262N and 3702E Access Points. The device itself is pretty nice… very thin, not very heavy, great keyboard and doubles as a tablet. I’ll be sad to give it up when I figure out what’s broken. Watch my blog for a follow-up and possible conclusion.

Update: August 30, 2016 – workaround is to enable A-MPDU for 802.11n – Lenovo ThinkPad T460 Yoga with Intel AC 8260 Wireless Issues

Cheers!