Stretching data centers through hacks and kludges

Earlier this week my company had a workshop at Bella Sky in Copenhagen. We have such gathering twice a year, TechnoCamp, where a group of consultants meet to discuss and develop different solutions. This time was the 11th time such a gathering was held.  #technocamp  #tc11

The main focus this time was virtualization, disaster recovery and HA. I was part of a group discussing stretched data center networks.

Stretching data centers is becoming more and more popular (RTO && RPO=0) and is a requirement in order to support long distance vMotion. But as we all know, stretching layer 2 has a few drawbacks that need to be taken care of.

On the storage side, the split brain issue needs to be fixed and may cause serious headaches if it's not.

On the networking side we have other challenges that may bring down the network on both sides unless implemented correctly.

You may have heard about OTV and think that it is a silver bullet for such solutions. Well... I guess it's not quite that straight forward.

I taped (disked?) an interview with (soon to become) CCIE Håvard Nyhus (Twitter: @hnyhus Blog: http://technet.gathering.org/) where we are discussing these issues. The spoken language is Norwegian with English subtitles.

Since subtitles isn't working in the inline player, you should probably watch it directly on YouTube: http://youtu.be/ajD_UJhVCW8