Adios, Netgear router

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have bought a Netgear D7000 router. The reviews were good but after about 6 months of ownership, it decided to exhibit some pretty awful symptoms. One of which was completely and indiscriminately drop all wireless clients regardless of device type, range, band or frequency it resided on. A reconnect to the wireless network would prompt the passphrase again, weirdly. Even after putting in the passphrase (again) it wouldn’t connect. The only way to rectify this was to physically reboot the router.

Netgear support was pretty poor too. The support representative wanted me to downgrade firmware versions just to “see if it helps” despite confirming that this issue is not known in any of the published firmware versions.

Netgear support also suggested I changed the 2.4ghz network band. Simply put. They weren’t listening or couldn’t comprehend what I was saying.

Anyway, rant over. Amazon refunded me the £130 for the Netgear router after me explaining the situation about Netgear’s poor support. Amazing service really.

Hola, Ubiquiti

I’ve been eyeing up Ubiquiti for a while now but never had a reason to get any of their kit until now.  With me predominantly working from home when I’m not on the road and my other half running a business from home, stable connectivity is pretty important to both of us.

The EdgeMAX range from Ubiquiti looked like it fit the bill. I’d say it sits above the consumer-level stuff from the likes of Netgear, Asus, TP-Link etc and just below enterprise level kit from the likes of Juniper, Cisco, etc. Apart from the usual array of features found on devices of this type I particularly wanted to mess around with BGP/OSPF from my homelab when creating networks in VMware NSX.

With that in mind, I cracked open Visio and started diagramming, eventually ending up with the following:

I noted the following observations:

• Ubiquti Edgerouters do not have a build in VDSL modem, therefore for connections such as mine, I required a separate modem.
• The Edgerouter Lite has no hardware switching module, therefore it should be purely used as a router (makes sense)
• The Edgerouter X has a hardware switching module with routing capabilities (but lower total pps (Packets Per Second))

Verdict

I managed to set up the pictured environment over the weekend fairly easily. The Ubiquiti software is very modern, slick, easy to use and responsive. Leaps and bounds from what I’ve found on consumer-grade equipment.

I have but one criticism with the Ubiquiti routers, and that is not everything is easily configurable through the UI (yet). From what I’ve read Ubiquiti are making good progress with this, but for me I had to resort to the CLI to finish my OSPF peering configuration.

The wireless access point is decent. good coverage and the ability to provision an isolated guest network with custom portal is a very nice touch.

Considering the Edgerouter Lite costs about £80 I personally think it represents good value for money considering the feature set it provides. I wouldn’t recommend it for every day casual network users, but then again, that isn’t Ubiquiti’s market.

The Ubiquiti community is active and very helpful as well.

Perhaps one of VMware’s most significant announcements made in recent times is the partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), including the ability to leverage AWS’s infrastructure to provision vSphere managed resources. What exactly does this mean and what benefits could this bring to the enterprise?

Collaboration of Two Giants

To understand and appreciate the significance of this partnership we must acknowledge the position and perspective of each.

• Market leader in private cloud offerings
• Deep roots and history in virtualisation
• Expanding portfolio

• Market leader in public cloud offerings
• Broad and expanding range of services
• Global scale

VMware has a significant presence in the on-premise datacentre, in contrast to AWS which focuses entirely on the public cloud space. VMware cloud on AWS sits in the middle as a true hybrid cloud solution leveraging the established, industry-leading technologies and software developed by VMware, together with the infrastructure capabilities provided by AWS.

How it Works

In a typical setup, an established vSphere private cloud already exists. Customers can then provision an AWS-backed vSphere environment using a modern HTML5 based client. The environment created by AWS leverages the following technologies:

• ESXi on bare metal servers
• vSphere management
• vSAN
• NSX

The connection between the on-premise and AWS hosted vSphere environments is facilitated by Hybrid Linked Mode. This allows customers to manage both on-premise and AWS hosted environments through a single management interface. This also allows us to, for example, migrate and manage workloads between the two.

Advantages

Existing vSphere customers may already be leveraging AWS resources in a different way, however, there are significant advantages associated with implementing VMware cloud on AWS, such as:

Delivered as a service from VMware – The entire ecosystem of this hybrid cloud solution is sold, delivered and supported by VMware. This simplifies support, management, billing amongst other activities such as patching and updates.

Consistent operational model – Existing private cloud users use the same tools, processes and technologies to manage the solution. This includes integration with other VMware products included in the vRealize product suite.

Enterprise-grade capabilities – This solution leverages the extensive AWS hardware capabilities which include the latest in low latency IO storage technology based on Solid State Drive technology and high-performance networking.

Access to native AWS resources – This solution can be further expanded to access and consume native AWS technologies pertaining to databases, AI, analytics and more.

Use Cases

VMware Cloud on AWS has several applications, including (but not limited to) the following:

Datacenter Extension

Because of how rapidly an AWS-backed software-defined datacenter can be provisioned, expanding an on-premise environment becomes a trivial task. Once completed, these additional resources can be consumed to meet various business and technical demands.

Dev / Test

Adding additional capabilities to an existing private cloud environment enables the division of duties/responsibilities. This enables organisations to separate out specific environments for the purposes of security, delegation and management.

Application Migration

VMware cloud on AWS enables us to migrate N-tier applications to an AWS backed vSphere environment without the need to re-architect or convert our virtual machine/compute and storage constructs. This is because we’re using the same software-defined data centre technologies across our entire estate (vSphere, NSX and vSAN).

Conclusion

There are a number of viable applications for VMware Cloud on AWS and it’s a very strong offering considering the pedigree of both VMware and AWS. Combining the strengths from each creates a very compelling option for anyone considering a hybrid cloud adoption strategy.

To learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS please review the following:

https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/

https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws