Cisco Tech Days – Don’t Miss Out

Want to get the inside scoop on network technology straight from the network experts? Cisco is hosting its Tech Days series throughout the month of May and into June in several cities throughout the country. I’ve attended the sessions in the past and found them to be very useful. Viewing demos, hearing about product roadmaps and features from the horse’s mouth is very helpful.


The hot topics this year include borderless networking, virtualization and collaboration technologies. Find out how the newest innovations can help you develop strategies and deploy solutions to make your network more efficient and effective.

Get the full details here for all the locations and dates. If you’ll be attending the event on May 26th in McLean, VA or the June 9th event in San Francisco, CA let me know. It would be great to meet up and discuss some of these latest networking trends.

Where are the best jobs in IT going to be in 2010?

Are network related jobs going to be hot in 2010? Looking for an answer to the question, I turned to Network World’s article on the 10 best IT jobs right now. With all the talk of security and virtualization, I was wondering if network related work would make the top 10.


The job of network engineer came in at number four on the list. According to Gartner, interest in networking, voice and data communications technologies increased for 2010, meaning skills in that high-tech area will also be in demand. With the need for social interactions and collaboration, network skills still remain hot.


I’m sure one of the reasons being a network engineer is one of the best jobs is because of all the great network management solutions that make life easier (I’m of course biased). Take for example, the solution I use – dopplerVUE. The software is installed and up and running in less than 30 minutes. It’s great - I get to start working on what I do best as soon as possible. Once installed, the package offers integrated fault, performance and auto-updating discovery across devices, apps, servers and services. Take a free test drive if you want to make your life a little easier.

Some other jobs that made the top 10 included security specialist, virtual systems manager, capacity manager, open source specialist, service assurance manager, electronic health records systems manager, sourcing specialist, service catalog manager and business process manager. Some of these jobs make sense considering the new technology trends, but I’ll admit some took me by surprise. What do you think of some of these jobs? Do you have any nominations for the best IT jobs?

Taking Advantage of Network Virtualization

I’ve been hearing a lot about the benefits of virtualization for network management. From improved productivity to increased efficiency, network virtualization holds much promise. However, for all the benefits that virtualization brings to the field of network management, it also brings a few challenges.

How do you keep track of your virtual assets and real ones? Do you need a special team, tools or hardware to get the job done? It turns out that the most popular virtualization system (VMware), makes this an easy job for most network management systems when configured correctly.

VMware’s workstation product gives you three choices for network virtualization: Bridged, NAT and Host Only.

Bridged: This mode creates a virtual switch that sits between the host NIC and the VM instance. The VM instance looks like another PC on the network, it shares the host NIC resources and has an IP Address assigned via DHCP or static entry. A bridged VM instance looks and feels very much like a separate server on the network. It provides full monitoring capabilities similar to that of the host.

NAT: NAT mode uses the host machine's IP address to communicate with the network. As a result, no external IP address is assigned and the VM instance is not visible to the external network. This method provides a high level of security, but does not allow you to poll the VM instance directly. This method requires additional specialized software and agents.

Host Only: This method sets up a network that is completely contained within the host. It has no ability to communicate with the outside world. You will not be able to see the VM instance at all.

As you can see, the methods used for setting up networking on a virtual instance will determine what an IT management application will “see” and monitor. While this example is specific to VMware, most products offer similar options.

If you’re a dopplerVUE user you can create a group and associate the virtual devices to a physical device. dopplerVUE groups provide a view of all alarms and performance overlays in a single view, and allows drill down access into the performance of each virtual server.