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It’s been an eventful 2010 for the EX Series Ethernet Switches—and we’re just over halfway through.
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Automate What You Can, Do What You Must...
Junos Automation is a powerful, yet flexible onbox scripting toolset built-in Junos operating system.
Think of it as an extension of Junos…which automate and streamline your day-to-day operational and configuration tasks:
Junos Automation comes standard in all Junos platforms – routing, switching and security devices.
Not only it helps to lower the operational expense, it also increases network uptime and availability by minimizing misconfiguration due to human factors.
To learn more, visit the Junos Automation landing page in Junos Central
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Thank you for participating in the Tech Café Switching Simplified event. We enjoyed our discussions and welcomed the opportunity to answer your questions and hear your opinions during this 32-hour event. Learning about your experiences with our products was extremely helpful and provides us with valuable insight as we design and deliver future products. We also appreciate your feature suggestions and will route these to the appropriate business teams for consideration.
In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be bringing you even more exciting switching solutions designed to help you streamline your business and simplify all aspects of your network. To stay current with what we have in store, read the latest switching news at www.juniper.net/switch
Thanks again for participating. We look forward to hearing from you again soon.
- Andy
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Juniper’s Virtual Chassis supports both local and extended links in an arbitrary topology within a single Virtual Chassis. How will you use this capability to simplify your network? Here are a few thoughts:
Linking multiple switches across a large warehouse, retail space, manufacturing floor, transportation center, or other relatively low port-density environment. This allows an entire building to be managed as a single, resilient networking element.
Combining multiple smaller buildings, including guard stations, portable/temporary buildings, or small offices into a single switch. This allows smaller locations to be aggregated into a single network element, maintaining more consistent management and access port scale across a heterogeneous campus.
Allowing a large branch office to present itself as a single WAN router (SRX) plus a single switch, simplifying maintenance of remote locations with up to 480 switch ports.
Combining multiple wiring closets on a single floor into one Virtual Chassis, reducing total maintenance overhead.
Any other creative thoughts or use cases? If you’ve already deployed EX4200 VC, what savings have you realized? What can we do to keep lowering your operational costs?
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On the EX4200 VC, the egress port is determined by the ingress hash, so the data could exit either a local port or a port on another VC member.
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Regarding high availability features on EX, we currently have support for capabilities such as GRES today, as well as the usual network protocol level HA functions. Starting with our next software release (10.4), we will enable NSR for OSPF as well as a non-stop software upgrade function on EX8200 that will allow the chassis software to be upgraded without a system-wide reboot (each line card will restart individually, allowing network connectivity to be maintained during the software upgrade process). We do have a complete high-availability rollout planned for both the EX8200 and our Virtual Chassis products in 2011 which will leverage all the JUNOS HA capabilities. Details are available under NDA.
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I like to think that there are both data plane and control plane differences between most stacking implementations and Juniper’s Virtual Chassis:
From a data plane perspective, each VC ingress port can directly address any VC destination port regardless of member location, and all features apply VC-wide (including features such as link aggregation). This is how traditional chassis operate, and is much different than simply stitching multiple boxes together in a ring.
From a control plane perspective, the traditional JUNOS master/backup routing engine architecture is preserved, and all members have a consistent view of the forwarding database. This provides a substantial improvement in management and availability.
Finally, the internal data flow uses a shortest-path, cost-aware and multicast-aware protocol, ensuring optimal use of the VC backplane resources and allowing multipath and extended reach topologies, allowing customers new degress of flexibility in network architecture, resulting in substantial capital and operational expense reduction…
Regards, Dave
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dfex, you are certainly correct in saying that we have a number of the elements in place already. EX switches can retrieve JUNOS software for an upgrade using DHCP, however they are unable to currently pull down the configuration using this method.
However once an EX has it’s config loaded it can "call home" to NSM and retreive it’s production configuration and be integrated into the management platform. I recently assisted a customer doing this type of deployment. We loaded a very basic configuration onto the device (IP address, gateway, NSM Config) and then rolled out 100 devices into the network…NSM was prepovisioned to expect the exact EX (based on Serial number) to call home and then the configuration was uploaded was connected. Not a perfect solution given that the base config had to be loaded, but sped deployment up significantly.
As far as Trill is concerned we have very similar capabilities with Virtual Chassis Extension on the EX4200 (and now EX8200 Series) devices. Virtual Chassis Extension lets up to 10 EX4200 devices connect together using 1Gb or 10Gb interfaces via any topology and act as a single switch – providing the same and more benifits as proposed by Trill. I’ve got several customers running VCE in the wide area as a ring, connecting Datacenters and offices together….layer-2 every where with no spanning tree in sight!
re
Francois
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Given that we have both Juniper staff and customers that have migrated to a Juniper Networks switching platform it would be great if we could hear the experience of customers during and after this move. There are some exciting features in the EX-Series that make a positive change, reducing the complexity of the network and making operation simpler…what was your experience?
Francois
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(Sorry, misread the question…the below is for DHCP options to upstream clients, not for the EX Switch itself…let me check on that)
Yes, option 82 has been supported since JUNOS 9.3. Here is the output of the DHCP option configuration section in the CLI. You can configure options 1 through 255 and specific many possible catagories for each option.
CLI Output…
[edit system services dhcp]
admin@ex-switch# set option ?
Possible completions:
<option-identifier-code> DHCP option identifier code (1..255)
[edit system services dhcp]
admin@ex-switch# set option 82 ?
Possible completions:
<[Enter]> Execute this command
> array Array of values
byte Unsigned 8-bit value
byte-stream Stream of unsigned 8-bit values within quotes
flag Boolean flag value
integer Signed 32-bit numeric value
ip-address IP address value
short Signed 16-bit numeric value
string Character string value
unsigned-integer Unsigned 32-bit numeric value
unsigned-short Unsigned 16-bit numeric value
| Pipe through a command
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EX 3200/4200 switches (I’ve not personally checked other models) allow the entire device to be operated from a USB key installed in the external USB slot. Additionally the internal flash can be snapshot to an external USB flash device as a backup measure.
For example I have a customer running all their EX Switches from External USB flash drives…..they have some backup/spare EX4200’s in storage pre-configured to operate from the USB slot. So during a failure event they take one of the shelf, move the USB over an power it on. This is great for installations where you don’t have experienced network engineers :)
Francois
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The latest security buzzword is APT: Advanced Persistent Threat. Is APT important and should we be concerned? I’m afraid the answer to both these questions is “yes.” But knowledge is power. If we understand APT, we can learn how to protect against it.
Previously, most external threats to commercial enterprises came from hackers and criminals. These threats are generally opportunistic and unoriginal. Everyone’s money is equal so criminals and hackers focus on the softest targets. If one defender is more secure than average, these attackers focus elsewhere. And the tools they use are nothing special, just prebuilt exploits that they bought on the Internet. This is similar to home security. You don’t need perfect security. If your security is clearly better than your neighbor’s, the thieves will go to his house. And their burglary tools will come from the hardware store: crowbars and screwdrivers.
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Welcome, I’m Andy Ingram, Vice President of Product Marketing for Juniper’s Fabric & Switching Technologies Business Group. For the next 24 hours (and beyond) we look forward to hearing your thoughts and answering your questions about how to simplify your network architecture using Juniper solutions. We invite you to ask questions about our 3-2-1 DC network architecture, our innovative Virtual Chassis technology, our EX Series family of Ethernet switches, the Junos Operating System that works across our routing, security and switching families as well as Junos Space (orchestration software), and experiences that you have migrating your network to Juniper.
We have wizards online to engage in your discussions about:
If network simplicity is something that you strive to achieve, you might also be interested in reading a couple of related blogs that I recently published in the Architecting Networking section of J-Net.
We hope you enjoy today’s discussions around simplifying switching and hope you get some key takeaways that will help your organization advance the economics and experience of your network.
Andy
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