In the last episode HomeLab Stage LI: Datacenter Resizing I have re-racked and re-cabled my two datacenters at my house. What´s next? Velocloud, of course!
Starting point:
I started with one Velocloud Edge 840 (SuperMicro X10SDV Version) in November 2019. It was love at first sight / touch. Combining my internet connections and using them not only active / passive was a huge step forward. Playing with the different options: priorization of clients, quality of experience and finally traffic steering. What an amazing product.
You can check the status for three different traffic types: audio, video and transaction. The Velocloud calculates the score for each carier independently. 10 is the highest value.
High Availability:
Several months later, I configured my second Velocloud Edge instance for High Availability reasons. The port GE1 is hard-coded to be used for HA traffic between the edges. Please don´t use that interface for other things….
For testing scenarios I deployed 2 virtual edges. Those edges are also managed via the Velocloud Orchestrator (SaaS). There is technically no difference between a hardware edge and a virtual edge.
Here is a list of the different virtual edge configurations:
I am testing with different software releases on all my velocloud instances, before upgrading customer sites.
High Latency Demo Kit:
For customer demos I decided to deploy one special configured Velocloud edge. I wanted to show the different TCP optimization features:
Jitter Buffering, Forward Error Correction…..
I configured one WANem 3.0 Beta VM in front of the virtual Velocloud edge to play with bandwidth and packet loss limitations:
Here is the configuration website for the WANem VM. I configured mine to work on eth0 with the following settings:
These settings within WANem are directly related to the Quality of Experience value inside the Velocloud orchestrator
New Hardware Models:
VMware has discontinued some existing hardware models:
I wanted to test and play with the new edges (Dell hardware) to get more hands on before running them at customer locations.
These machines are desktop models, but there exist a rackmount-kit. Downside is, that these rackmount-kits are for dual setups and the take 2U inside your rack:
I ordered 3 x edge 620 (Dell version) for showing remote brach offices. My colleagues are very happy about the fact, that they are now official branch locations 🙂
Dynamic Routing:
After running in production with static routes for a long time, it was time to address the dynamic routing again. In the past I had done it with OSPF to NSX-V, but with NSX-T I never modified it….
I wanted to go for BGP this time. I good friend of mine helped me a lot with the configuration. Thanks Lukasz 🙂
Next steps:
Cloud VPN
Edge to Edge VPN
Route based and policy based VPNs
Stay tuned for the next episodes. My head is still full of ideas…. Want more? Check out the next episode: HomeLab Stage LIII: Infoblox