One Month to Cisco Live Las Vegas

We’re down to just a month before it’s time for Cisco Live in Las Vegas 2017. I’m really looking forward to meeting with a lot of people and attending some great sessions. This will also be my first event as a Cisco Netvet 🙂 I have a few focus areas for this year’s event.

Cisco IWAN

I have a few IWAN projects I’m working on and I’m going to deep dive into IWAN during CLUS. My plans here are to attend the techtorial on Sunday and meet with some of the prominent people behind IWAN. Those contacts are invaluable to have when you are working on complex scenarios. I also want to see what’s on the roadmap and if I can find out anything about how the acquisition of Viptela will affect IWAN, if at all. I also want to see if APIC-EM has matured to be more useful in brownfield scenarios. Another interesting thing I will try to learn more about is how to best do monitoring in an IWAN network.

Cisco ACI

We have a lot of customers moving to ACI right now. Many of them have “legacy” data centers based on the Catalyst 6500. Moving to a vendor based fabric can always be argued but the reality is most companies still have a plethora of applications that require technologies like vMotion to be able to move workloads since the app wasn’t designed from the beginning to support failing over to another instance in another subnet (L3). Many companies also don’t have the manpower or knowledge level to operate a network based on VXLAN, EVPN, Ansible etc. without some abstraction layer above it all.

Campus Fabric

The trend right now is that everything is moving to overlays. The enterprise campus is no different. Some of the drivers behind this is that the enterprise also want to leverage things like ECMP, anycast gateways and host mobility. The host mobility is especially prevalent in the wireless network where hosts will roam between different controllers and where technologies like anchoring had to be used in the past. I’ll try to see what the latest is on the campus fabric and if it’s mature yet to be something that can be deployed. One concern I have with this technology is that it uses LISP which is a fairly complex protocol. Most of this is probably abstracted away but I want to make sure this technology won’t be too complex to operate.

Devnet

I didn’t spend as much time as I wanted to last year in Devnet. I’ll definitely try to spend more time there this year. I’ve been starting a bit lately to learn som basic Python and learn how to consume APIs. During CLUS I’ll try to find out the roadmap for different products on when they are getting things like YANG, Restconf and Python on box. Hopefully I’ll have some time to try some of the Devnet labs and meet with some of the interesting people in this community.

Other Plans

I try to keep a balance between booking a lot of sessions and leaving some time to walk around in the World of Solutions and having slots open to meet with interesting people. With my background as a CCDE I try to help out in spreading the word about this certification and mentoring people in how to attain a designer’s mindset and the study path to become a design expert. I also have a lot of friends from Twitter, IRC, Slack, Routergods etc. that I try to meet up with. Being a Cisco VIP and Cisco Champion also means there’s always activities to go to so I’m sure it will be a crazy busy week as usual.

I hope to see some of my readers there and I’m sure it will be a great event. See you soon!