A few weeks back I posted about my experience using VirtualBox to create running Arista vEOS instances. I loved how VirtualBox made is so easy to create VMs. However it seemed unwieldy and error prone to rely upon the VirtualBox console to attach each vEOS interface to a particular LAN segment. My last post explored using the CLI to create these mappings. I had planned to generate topologies using a script to create the appropriate vboxmanage commands at some later date….
Sometimes it’s best not to trust network vendor datasheets. Nothing quite beats a controlled test of a network device in your lab with your config and your required features. But if you want to load test multiple ports on your 10G device-under-test (or DUT), then things can get very expensive, very fast. In this post I’ll show a test topology that will help you turn 10Gbps of test traffic into 640Gbps or more.
Corrupted frames are the devils spawn. A few noisy links causing frame corruption can quickly degrade network performance, and troubleshooting them is getting harder. These integrity errors generally occur when signal noise causes a binary ‘1’ to be mistaken for a binary ‘0’ or vice-versa. This post takes a look at integrity errors and the impacts of corrupted frames in a cut-through switched network. Throughout this post I’ll use the term ‘CRC errors’ term to refer to frame integrity errors which…
A few years ago, I had the chance to attend an IXIA training course in our Dublin office. I had seen the time-suck of network test gear before. So I said, “I’m not spending a week trying to learn a test-set. It’ll be cool, but what’s the point. I won’t get the time to apply those skills, then I’ll forget, and it will be a wasted week.” I declined the training.
We have a network lab? Spirent presented their new lab-management software, called iTest Lab Optimizer, at network field day 4 recently. Their product name isn’t catchy, but it is very descriptive and addresses a market need. The simple fact is that most lab networks don’t get optimised to their full potential for some of the following reasons: Nobody knows what is in the lab (or that one exists) – Inventory Management The availability of the lab devices is unknown – Availability and…