Wednesday, May 24, 2006

NetQoS presentation at the San Diego Cisco User Group

NetQoS presented this evening at the San Diego Cisco User Group. It is an interesting product that competes with NetScout. It has a very cool web interface and seems robust, especially the overview NetQoS Performance Center which is the umbrella product that will aggregate SuperAgent, ReporterAnalyzer and NetVoyant.

There are some differences in their approach but the end functionality seems very on par. NetQoS does not make use of probes so it has some limitations on doing Layer2 correlation but their SuperAgent does application performance and the Harvester is a collector for NetFlow.

They are making use of IPFIX (new IETF name for Cisco's Netflow)* and IP-SLA (new IETF name for Cisco's Service Assurance Agent - SAA)* to do performance measurement from Cisco routers and switches. That is a unique aspect of their product.
- Ed

* - corrected on May 31st, 2006 - Thanks John!

Monday, May 15, 2006

Hands on Presentation on VMware ESX at TVNUG

Tomorrow night I will be presenting a hands on lab (with several other colleagues) on VMware ESX at the TVNUG meeting. We have one server built out and ready to go for the lab and another that will be blanked out to build another ESX server. With any luck, we will get both up and running and then get Virtual Center working to allow everyone access to build VM's. I'm pretty excited to see how this one turns out.
- Ed

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Victor Oppleman's Presentation on IP Sinkholes and Darknets is available

If you are interested in getting a copy of Victor's presentation please head over to SFNTUG's Downloads and Links page. From there you can get to Victor's website, his books and to his posted presentation. It is worth taking a look at, especially if you are way to busy to be running IDS/IPS configurations but want something that will catch issues on your network.
- Ed

Friday, May 05, 2006

Learning about VMWare ESX

I just got together with several colleagues last night to work on an ESX lab for our local user group to give a presentation. I must say I am very impressed with the product. We got a server loaded up and started doing best practices on the build out. I wanted to thank Mike O'Reilly with VMWare for coming out to do all the education.

If you really want to get involved I recommended you check out VMWare's VMTN subscription.
- Ed

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Victor Oppleman speaking at SFNTUG today

Victor Oppleman will be presenting today at the SFNTUG meeting in San Francisco. Victor is the author of Extreme Exploits : Advanced Defenses Against Hardcore Hacks and will be presenting on "Defeating Denial of Service, Decreasing False Positives, and Enriching Network Intelligence using IP Sinkholes" which should be really good stuff.

Also, a quick thank you to Mark Mendelson for putting me in contact with Victor to make this all happen!
- Ed