Let's Have Some Knowledge - MPLS Technology

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a standards-approved technology for speeding up network traffic flow and making it easier to manage. MPLS involves setting up a specific path for a given sequence of packets, identified by a label put in each packet, thus saving the time needed for a router to look up the address to the next node to forward the packet to. MPLS is called multiprotocol because it works with the Internet Protocol (IP), Asynchronous Transport Mode (ATM), and frame relay network protocols. With reference to the standard model for a network (the Open Systems Interconnection, or OSI model), MPLS allows most packets to be forwarded at the Layer 2 (switching) level rather than at the Layer 3 (routing) level. In addition to moving traffic faster overall, MPLS makes it easy to manage a network for quality of service (QoS). For these reasons, the technique is expected to be readily adopted as networks begin to carry more and different mixtures of traffic.

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a mechanism in high-performance telecommunications networks that directs data from one network node to the next based on short path labels rather than long network addresses, avoiding complex lookups in a routing table. The labels identify virtual links (paths) between distant nodes rather than endpoints. MPLS can encapsulate packets of various network protocols.

MPLS is a scalable, protocol-independent transport. In an MPLS network, data packets are assigned labels. Packet-forwarding decisions are made solely on the contents of this label, without the need to examine the packet itself. This allows one to create end-to-end circuits across any type of transport medium, using any protocol. The primary benefit is to eliminate dependence on a particular OSI model data link layer technology, such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Frame Relay, Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET) or Ethernet, and eliminate the need for multiple layer-2 networks to satisfy different types of traffic. MPLS belongs to the family of packet-switched networks.

MPLS operates at a layer that is generally considered to lie between traditional definitions of layer 2 (data link layer) and layer 3 (network layer), and thus is often referred to as a "layer 2.5" protocol. It was designed to provide a unified data-carrying service for both circuit-based clients and packet-switching clients which provide a datagram service model. It can be used to carry many different kinds of traffic, including IP packets, as well as native ATM, SONET, and Ethernet frames.

MPLS has been originally proposed to allow high performance traffic forwarding and traffic engineering in IP networks. However it evolved in Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) to allow the creation of label-switched paths (LSPs) also in not native IP networks, such as SONET/SDH networks and wavelength switched optical networks.

CISCO IOS and MPLS

Cisco IOS Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) enables Enterprises and Service Providers to build next-generation intelligent networks that deliver a wide variety of advanced, value-added services over a single infrastructure. This economical solution can be integrated seamlessly over any existing infrastructure, such as IP, Frame Relay, ATM, or Ethernet. Subscribers with differing access links can be aggregated on an MPLS edge without changing their current environments, as MPLS is independent of access technologies.

Integration of MPLS application components, including Layer 3 VPNs, Layer 2 VPNs, Traffic Engineering, QoS, GMPLS, and IPV6 enable the development of highly efficient, scalable, and secure networks that guarantee Service Level Agreements.

Cisco IOS MPLS delivers highly scalable, differentiated, end-to-end IP services with simple configuration, management, and provisioning for providers and subscribers. A wide range of platforms support this solution, which is essential for both Service Provider and Enterprise networks.

Windows XP - The Legendary Operating System from Microsoft will end its life on April 8th 2014 !!!

The End of an Era 

What is Windows XP end of support?

Microsoft has provided support for Windows XP for the past 12 years. But now the time has come for Microsoft, along with their hardware and software partners, to invest their resources toward supporting more recent technologies so that Microsoft can continue to deliver great new experiences.

As a result, after April 8, 2014, technical assistance for Windows XP will no longer be available, including automatic updates that help protect your PC. Microsoft will also stop providing Microsoft Security Essentials for download on Windows XP on this date. (If you already have Microsoft Security Essentials installed, you will continue to receive antimalware signature updates for a limited time, but this does not mean that your PC will be secure because Microsoft will no longer be providing security updates to help protect your PC.)

If you continue to use Windows XP after support ends, your computer will still work but it might become more vulnerable to security risks and viruses. Also, as more software and hardware manufacturers continue to optimize for more recent versions of Windows, you can expect to encounter greater numbers of apps and devices that do not work with Windows XP.

Let's have a some product knowledge of forthcoming Cisco UCS C460 M4 Rack Server

Cisco UCS C460 M4 Rack Server

Gain Performance, Reliability, and Scalability

The Cisco UCS C460 M4 Rack Server offers exceptionally high performance and reliability to power the most compute- and memory-intensive, mission-critical enterprise applications and virtualized workloads.

Features and Capabilities

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The Cisco UCS C460 M4 Rack Server offers industry-leading performance and advanced reliability well suited for the most demanding enterprise and mission-critical workloads, large-scale virtualization, and database applications.

Either as standalone or in UCS-managed operations, customers gain the benefits of the Cisco UCS C460 M4 server's high-capacity memory when very large memory footprints such as the following are required:

• SAP workloads
• Database applications and data warehousing
• Large virtualized environments
• Real-time financial applications
• Java-based workloads
• Server consolidation

Specifications at a Glance

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• Four rack-unit (4RU) chassis
• Either 2 or 4 Intel® Xeon® processor E7-4800 v2 or E7-8800 v2 product family CPUs
• Up to 6 terabytes (TB) of double-data-rate 3 (DDR3) memory in 96 dual in-line memory (DIMM) slots
• Up to 12 Small Form Factor (SFF) hot-pluggable SAS/SATA/SSD disk drives
• 10 PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 3 slots supporting the Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Cards and third-party adapters and GPUs
• Two Gigabit Ethernet LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) ports
• Two 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports
• A dedicated out-of-band (OOB) management port

This Product will be available in Q2, calendar year 2014

A Quick Reference Guide to Choose Your Virtualization Platform

When you are choosing a Virtualization platform for your IT infrastructure. Your architecture and capabilities may be limited by the features offered by each product. This article thumbnails the feature of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, VMware vSphere 5.1 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. This article allows you to compare features and benefits across multiple Virtualization platforms. This is a quick reference only not covered all areas of Virtualization platform like Storage, Network, Security, Cost etc. 

Have a Look - Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper - V Improved Feature

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Don't Miss To Learn The Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper - V Improved Features 

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1. Hybrid Cloud :

Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is built on the same hypervisor as Windows Server. This means that there is complete virtual machine compatibility between the private cloud, partner public clouds, and the Microsoft-owned public cloud.

2.Compressed Live Migration :

A compression engine is built into Live Migration in Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. The processor in hosts is often underused, so this engine makes use of this spare resource to compress the memory of virtual machines that are being moved before the memory pages are copied across the Live Migration network. Hyper-V will monitor the utilization of CPU resources on the host and throttle compression to prioritize guest services. Enabling Live Migration compression on networks with 10 Gbps or less without Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA/SMB Direct) support will greatly reduce the time it takes to move virtual machines (not including storage migration).

3. SMB Direct Live Migration :

Live Migration can be configured to leverage SMB Direct (Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA) on hosts that that NICs with support for this feature. This feature will provide hardware offloaded accelerated copy of memory pages using SMB 3.0 NICs. This can take advantage of SMB Multichannel to span multiple networks. SMB Direct Live Migration provides the fastest way to live migrate virtual machines (not including storage) from one host to another.
A crazy fact: Memory speed will be the bottleneck on a host with PCI3 support and three RDMA NICs for Live Migration!


This feature allows very interesting new architectures, especially where organizations have decided to deploy SMB 3.0 storage with support for SMB Direct. Investments in RDMA can be leveraged to move virtual machines very rapidly over these physical networks (with QoS applied for SLA). For example, Cluster Aware Updating (CAU) will be performed much more rapidly.

4. Live Resizing of VHDX :

Virtual hard disks of the VHDX format that are attached to the SCSI controllers of virtual machines can be resized without shutting down the virtual machine. VHDX files can be up- and down-sized. Downsizing can only occur if there is unpartitioned space within the VHDX. This feature supports both Windows and Linux guests.

Live Resizing of VHDX files will be of huge value to those running mission critical workloads. It will also offer a new self-service elasticity feature for clouds.

5. Storage Quality of Service (QoS) :

New storage metrics for IOPS have been added to Windows Server 2012 R2. With these metrics, you can determine the IOPS requirements of virtual machines and put caps on storage activity. This will limit how much physical disk activity that virtual machines can create, and therefore limit the damage that activity spikes can cause to other virtual machines and their guest services.

One of the concerns with shared storage is the possibility of a race for storage throughput. Enabling Storage QoS will limit the damage that any virtual machine or tenant can do in a cloud.

6. Live Virtual Machine Cloning :

Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V allows you to clone a running virtual machine. This will create an exact copy of the virtual machine that is stored in a saved state. This feature supports GenerationID. That means you can use Live Virtual Machine Cloning to create Active Directory supported clones of a virtual domain controller that is not the PDC Emulator.

This feature will be useful for situations where you need to debug a production system or you want to perform tests, such as guest OS upgrades.

7. Virtual Machine Export Improvements :

You can export a virtual machine with a checkpoint (formerly known as a snapshot) and you can export a checkpoint of a virtual machine.

8. Linux Guest OS Support Enhancements : 

Dynamic Memory will be supported in Linux Guest OS’s on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. This will give much better memory optimization for Linux virtual machines, and it'll allow for much greater densities. Linux distributions with this built-in Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V HyH support are already available.

There will be support for online backup of Linux guest OSs. This is not Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Linux, and it does not give an application consistent backup. Instead, a file system consistent backup is created by freezing the file system. This feature does require an upgrade of any already deploy Linux Integration Services.

9. Shared VHDX :

You can configure up to 64 virtual machines to share a single VHDX file on some shared storage (such as CSV or SMB 3.0). The VM sees the shared VHDX as a shared SAS disk with SCSI-3 persistent reservations. This is for data volumes to create guest clusters, and not for shared boot volumes. It works with down-level guest OSs, such as Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Integration Components installed. This feature is supported by Service Templates in VMM 2012 R2.
This will drastically simplify guest clustering, where virtual machines are used to create a highly available service at the application layer. This could eliminate the need for guest attachment to physical LUNs and will be accommodating to self-service deployment within a cloud.

10. Hyper-V Replica Improvements :

The default period for asynchronous replication of the Hyper-V Replica Log is every 5 minutes, but this can be changed to every 30 seconds or every 15 minutes. This allows companies to choose the allowed recovery point objective (RPO) – the maximum allowed amount of data loss in time.

Hyper-V Replica can now be extended to a third site. This is an A-B-C extension, and not an A-B/A-C extension. For example, a company might replicate virtual machines from the primary site to a local secondary site. This might be configured to hdappen every 30 seconds. Replica virtual machines in the secondary site might be replicated to a distant third site (such as a hosting company) maybe every 15 minutes. In the event of an unplanned failover, this would give an RPO of 30 seconds in the secondary site and an RPO of 15 minutes and 30 seconds in the third site.

The performance and scalability of Hyper-V Replica has been improved. Maintaining historical copies of virtual machines in the secondary site is costly (IOPS). This has been reduced, so maintaining historical copies of your replica VMs will not punish your storage in the secondary site.

11. VM Connect :

The crippled virtual machine connection of the past is being replaced by a Remote Desktop experience that is built into the virtualization stack. This has no dependency on the virtual machine’s networking. By default, this feature is disabled in Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and enabled in Windows 8.1 Client Hyper-V.
Things that Remove Desktop VM Connect allow you to do include:

•   Copy & paste text/images.
•   Copy files to/from the client desktop.
•   Do session-based USB redirection. This means you might use a USB stick to copy files. It is not a USB dongle solution.

12. Cross-Version Shared-Nothing Live Migration :

You can live migrate a virtual machine from Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V to Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. This could eliminate downtime when deploying Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. For example, you can deploy a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V host/cluster alongside an existing Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V host/cluster. You can then live migrate the virtual machines from the older platform to the new platform with zero downtime to the availability of the services provided by the virtual machines.

Note that you cannot do a Live Migration from Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. It is a one-way upgrade path.

13. System Center Release Alignment :

This is the first time that Windows Server (and thus Hyper-V) is being developed with and released at or close to the same time as System Center. There has been closer than ever before cooperation within Windows Server and System Center (WSSC). That means you can deploy System Center immediately and follow it up with Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V, without the long delays of the past.

Sunday Fun : Work Around Solution to increase the speed of your machine in 10 easy Steps by using a Pen Drive !!!

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Before Start the Activity Keep in Mind !!!
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1. If you are using Windows 7. Start by doing steps 1 and 2, but then a different window will pop up.     Just click "Advanced system settings" on the sidebar and continue the steps
2. You must be logged in as Administer to do this task
3. Do not remove the Pen Drive. It'll crash your system
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Step 1

Insert the Pen Drive. Let the PC to read it. Make sure to delete all the stuff on it first.(Minimum 2 GB Storage Required)

Step 2

Right click on My Computer. Click on Properties from context menu

Step 3

Click on Advanced tab

Step 4

Click on Settings under Performance

Step 5

Click on Advanced tab

Step 6

Click on Change button under Virtual memory

Step 7

Select your Pen drive

Step 8

Click on custom size radio button and give the values as give below :
Initial Size:1020
Maximum size:1020
The size depends upon your free memory capacity of your pen drive. So you can change this limit according to your pen drive size

Step 9

Click on Set button, then click on OK

Step 10

Now you have to restart the computer with Pen-Drive inserted. Enjoy the Speed !!!

Why This Blog ???

Hi All

I have started this Blog on behalf of GTechnosoft's IT Learning Division - GTechEd. The purpose of this Blog, to make an independent Discussion Forum on Information Technology and Services. Here we request all IT lovers to Join and Share new Technologies and their views on it. We also request all of you, kindly share your infrastructure related challenges here. We request our readers and contributors to provide their valuable Thought regarding your challenge, on this forum. So that your challenge will resolve very efficiently and we will learn something new.

Because I believe, no one in the world of IT cant say that he/she knows everything. If they thing so, I believe it was the death of his/her IT Life.    

We want to make it as a quick reference platform for IT Lovers, who really want to learn or share their knowledge to guide someone who really need it or they gather some new knowledge from here. I personally request those person please stay away from this Blog, who thought they know everything on IT or who want judge our technical skill. Because we do not create this Blog to show off our Technical Capabilities.

I am ready to Learn Something New in IT. What About You ???

Thanks & Regards
Arghya
CEO-Gtechnosoft