| Lesson no. | Date | Topics |
| 1 | 06/03/2025 | Course introduction. Datacenter architecture and organization. Rack layout. Air conditioning and cooling plant. UPS and emergency generators. Energy efficiency of a datacenter. Power Usage Effectiveness. Datacenter Tiers (UpTime Institute classification). Modular datacenters. Small-scale sample datacenter layouts. Ethernet technology evolution. Transmission media used in datacenter networking: copper cables (UTP and STP/FTP), optical fibers (MMF and SMF), Twinax. 10 Gigabit Ethernet implementations and media. IEEE 802.3ae, IEEE 802.3ak, IEEE 802.3an. Transceivers. GBIC, SFP, SFP+, QSFP/QSFP+. |
| 2 | 07/03/2025 |
Switching theory fundamentals. Head-of-Line blocking. Clos networks. Clos theorem. Datacenter networking infrastructure. Datacenter networks: access layer. ToR and EoR organizations. Datacenter networks: aggregation layer. Oversubscription ratio. Bandwidth aggregation techniques. IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation. IEEE 802.1ax Link Aggregation Protocol LACP. Datacenter network infrastructure evolution. Leaf-spine topology. Some examples of leaf and spine commercial switches and large scale datacenter networks. |
| 3 | 13/03/2025 |
Virtualization technologies. The virtualization concept. Different approaches to IT resource virtualization. Type-1 and Type-2 hypervisors. Different kinds of hypervisors and virtualization platforms. VMware ESXi. KVM. Proxmox. virsh and Virtual Machine Manager.Virtual switches in type-1 and type-2 hypervisors. VM networking in a Linux based host. Software switches. Linux Bridge. brctl command.Open vSwitch: features and architecture. ovs-vsctl command.Macvlan. VEPA, bridge, private and passthru modes. |
| 4 | 14/03/2025 |
LAB-01: Creation of VMs with virt-manager and KVM. Use of cloud-init. Storage technologies for datacenters: DAS, NAS and SAN. SSD disks for datacenter servers. SCSI. Fibre Channel. Network convergence. Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). iSCSI. Implementation of iSCSI in Linux: target and initiator. |
| 5 | 20/03/2025 |
Container-based virtualization. Docker. Docker Engine and CLI. States of a Docker container. Docker images and layers. Docker build and Dockerfile. Docker Registries. Persistent data management strategies for Docker images. Volumes. Docker networking. Use of Linux Bridge in Docker. User-created networks. Bridge networks and port mapping. |
| 6 | 21/03/2025 |
YAML. Docker Compose. Networking in Docker Compose. LAB-02: Docker Compose demo: deployment of a web app base on 3 containers. Software routers. Quagga and FRR. ContainerLab. |
| 7 | 27/03/2025 |
More info on Dockerfile syntax. Difference between CMD and ENTRYPOINT instructions in Dockerfile. Creation of Dockerfile for a containerized Python application. LAB-03: ContainerLab demo with FRR and OSPF. |
| 8 | 04/04/2025 |
Datacenter networks and alternate paths exploitation: multipathing. Multipathing at Layer 2 in a leaf-spine topology: TRILL, SPB, VLT. Multipathing at Layer 3. Equal cost multi-path (ECMP). Improving ECMP load balancing with Flowlets. Multitenancy in datacenter networking. Virtual networking techniques in a datacenter. Multi-layer switches and Virtual Switch Interfaces. IEEE 802.1ad (Q-in-Q). Tunneling protocols and overlays. VXLAN. GRE and NVGRE. MPLS in datacenters. LAB-04: Emulation of a Leaf-Spine datacenter topology with OSPF in ContainerLab. |
| 9 | 10/04/2025 |
Kubernetes. Components of a Kubernetes cluster. General Kubernetes entities: pods, services, ingress, config map, secret, persistent volume, deployment, replica set, stateful set. Intro to Kubernetes design patterns. |
| 10 | 11/04/2025 |
LAB-05: Emulation of a Leaf-Spine datacenter topology with BGP, EVPN and VxLAN in ContainerLab. General ideas of Cloud Computing. Cloud service models: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. Cloud deployment models (public, private, hybrid, community). Elastic computing. Horizontal vs vertical scalability in the cloud. Cloud standards. Cloud migration. Introduction to Amazon AWS Cloud services. |
| 11 | 15/04/2025 |
Minikube. The kubectl CLI tool.
Creation of pods, service, replica set and deployment with kubectl. LAB-06: Kubernetes demo: deployment of multi-pod applications in a Minikube cluster. |
| 12 | 24/04/2025 |
IAM, EC2, VPC and S3. IAM users and groups. Console authentication with MFA. Access keys. Amazon aws CLI tool. LAB-07: Practical demo of Amazon AWS EC2 and S3. |
| 13 | 08/05/2025 |
AWS: Elastic Load Balancer. LAB 08: AWS ELB and dynamic Auto Scaling of EC2 instances. Introduction to AWS Lambda. An AWS Lambda function in Python: coding and testing. Introduction to REST APIs. |
| 14 | 09/05/2025 |
Microservices orchestration. The workflow concept. Orkes Conductor. Conductor core concepts: task, worker, workflow. Creation of a workflow in Orkes Conductor Cloud Edition. |
| 15 | 15/05/2025 |
Kubernetes networking. Pod and Service networking. Container Network Interfaces (CNIs). ISTIO Service Mesh. Some preliminary remarks on Kubernetes in multi-cluster environments and the LIQO solution. |
| 16 | 16/05/2025 |
Implementing a REST API in Python with Flask. Workflow-based Web Service orchestration with Conductor OSS (dockerized release). Workflows with operators switch and fork/join. |
| 17 | 21/05/2025 | Seminario su Cloud Networking. Cristian Perissinotto (CISCO). |
| 18 | 22/05/2025 |
Introduction to OpenStack. OpenStack: a quick tour with DevStack. OpenStack dashboard and CLI commands. |
| 19 | 23/05/2025 |
TCP performance problems in datacenter networks. TCP Incast. Datacenter-specific TCP variants: DCTCP. Evolution of the Dropbox infrastructure. |
| 20 | 27/05/2025 |
Seminario "Serverless computing in AWS ed orchestrazione tramite approccio IaC". Claudio Perrotta e Sabrina Russo (Epsilon). |
| 21 | 29/05/2025 | Cloud Automation. Terraform. LAB: Use of Terraform with Docker and AWS providers. |
| 22 | 30/05/2025 |
Network Automation and Network Programmability. Lifecycle of a network device. Solutions for day-0, day-1, day-2 and day-n network automation. NetDevOps pipeline and Continuos Integration/Continuos Development (CI/CD) for network as code. YANG data models. Encoding of YANG data models: XML vs JSON. NETCONF and RESTCONF protocols. Use of the netmiko and ncclient Python libraries for remote device configuration. |
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| Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard - Part 1: General Requirements | |
| Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard - Part 2: Balanced Twisted-Pair Cabling Components | |
| Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard - Part 3: Optical Fiber Cabling Components | |
| Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers | |
| (SP 800-145) Peter Mell (NIST), Tim Grance (NIST) - September 2011 | |
| Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN): A Framework for Overlaying Virtualized Layer 2 Networks over Layer 3 Networks |
sudo modprobe openvswitch) in the host OS (e.g. in the GNS3 VM if you are using it in GNS3).
Last update: June 3, 2025