Back from the islands

I work in the VC world now, so I had to take a vacation in August. Apparently, that is the rule. Apparently, I did not follow the VC rules perfectly according to Sand Hill Slave, as I did not go to Sun Valley but choose a more tropical destination. After my week off I am back thinking more about open source networking.

My recent post of the OFR+Asterisk generated some interesting email with folks lobbying for their favorite open source packages to be included with the OFR as well. OpenVPN seems popular with many Vyattans.

While I was away I see that Jessica Simpson had some things to say about open source networking at RouterGod. I guess that goes to show you that you never know where your bits may land.... Now that Jessica is divorced, maybe we can hit up her ex-husband as a customer too? :)

I also noticed that we have a few more locations on our Frappr map - very cool!

OFR + Asterisk - together at last?

As you can probably imagine, rarely a day goes by where I am not talking to people about Vyatta and the revolution of open source networking. Over the past few weeks I've noticed a pretty consistent trend in these conversations - people are asking me about running a single server with both the OFR and Asterisk simultaneously. The integration of voice and data services seems to be hot topic these days.

We're tracked interest in running other open source platforms on the OFR on a wiki page and Asterisk does make a showing there, but with votes both for and against. I think the argument for running the two together is the integration of multiple networking products and features on a single server that eases administration and deployment. I suspect that the argument against has to do with having the server be a single point of failure for both the voice and data networks. I don't know where I fall as both arguments are valid in various networking environments. However, I do feel passionately about giving the community a choice and seeing where the market evolves. Our closed source brethren seem to be focused on integrating multiple features on a single piece of proprietary hardware, so precedent is there in the market.

So, anyone out there want to make an image with both the OFR and Asterisk? Or maybe another open source networking package should be packaged into a single image first? If I go back to the Top Enhancements page of the wiki maybe the OFR should be bundled with the Looking Glass or nmap packages as a next step? Please let us know your thoughts!

Virtualizing Vyatta

Since the inception of Vyatta, we're thought about the potential of building virtual router/firewalls for the enterprise and service provider markets. It looks like some folks have been working on porting the OFR to Xen and VMWare (see Tarry's blog on porting Vyatta to VMWare here).

I suspect that a virtualized version of the OFR will have many interesting applications: virtual router for ISP customers, virtual firewalls for different enterprise labs and LANs, separation of production and staging traffic, test environments for websites and servers, etc. How do you plan on using the OFR in a virtual environment? You won't have any of those pesky licensing issues with our software when you virtualize it, unlike the issues around virtualizing Windows and other enterpise applications.

At least one thing is clear - virutalization is here for multiple technologies, as I wrote here on the Panoblog. Let's see where this goes with the OFR... could be very interesting!

Put your OFR (virtualized or not) on the Vyatta Users page on Frappr!