On 22/06/2013, at 7:23 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
If you have a server in the tradition of UNIX workstations sure. But such simple networking isn't the case for some servers today, and it's hard to see that it will be the case in the future. Sun's tagline of "the network is the computer" was true. But for servers these days "the computer is the network" is also the case. It's nothing for a server today to statically NAT or bridge IPv4 to VMs. Even in that case it's best if the guest VM picks up its IPv4 addressing using DHCP. But in the future we'll want to do better than that: to move network routing onto the server itself. These new "data centre ethernet" protocols are not entirely implemented in kernel space. Some run quite complex BGP and MPLS control planes; others run IS-IS control planes. The ethernet link itself isn't remaining a simple thing either. Once you're running a few hundred servers then management protocols start to pay their way: LLDP ("what server is on this switch port?"), ethernet OAM ("help, the cable is running errors"). What we don't want is a scenario where configuring these protocols on servers has to be done by network engineers. We want them configured from a GUI and supervised by a master daemon. Let's call that "NetworkManager". Now maybe Dan hasn't quite realised what he's signed up for here. But then again, there was a time when I despaired of Linux ever working with a 3G modem, whereas today it offers the best experience of all the operating systems. -glen -- Glen Turner <http://www.gdt.id.au/~gdt/> |
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