The following is posted on behalf of Shyam Iyer, an engineer on Dell's Linux Engineering team
Dell was in attendance in San Diego with the Linux community to talk, collaborate and discuss solutions that help Linux Customers. I did a talk at LinuxCon 2012, San Diego on Thursday, Aug 30 titled "Towards optimizing Network utilization and deployment in Virtualized environments - Shyam Iyer, Dell" (a copy of the presentation can be found here). The attendees were mostly sysadmins and network planners for their respective companies, and there was great knowledge sharing among attendees discussing their deployments, with almost fifty percent of the attendees saying they are virtualized. Interestingly that is close to what gartner and other research reports suggest. I talked about the need for architectures that efficiently utilize the network. The key drivers are:
- Workload driven vs traditional
- Orchestration
- Automation
- Compute
- Storage
- Network
These are well described in our Networking point of view and I think form the core of our involvement in solving customer pain points. With this premise I described a set of use cases where common Linux network deployments for virtualized servers could be optimized and where performance/management trade offs could be achieved. Some optimizations integrate open-vswitch based SDN methodology with traditional Linux networking.
I also did a developer presentation at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2012(co-located) titled "Harmonizing Multiqueue, Vmdq, virtio-net, macvtap with open-vswitch" on Friday, Aug 31 to discuss low-level implementation details with Linux network developers.
Overall the conference had a decent mix of sysadmins, developers and operations attendees. CloudOpen 2012 being co-located added to the festive spirit among conference attendees.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
