How do you increase the uptime of your critical workloads? How do you start setting up a Hyper-V Cluster in your organization? What are the Hyper-V design and networking configuration best practices? These are some of the questions you may have when you have large environments with many Hyper-V deployments. It is very essential for IT administrators to build disaster-ready Hyper-V Clusters rather than thinking about troubleshooting them in their production workloads. This whitepaper will help you in deploying a Hyper-V Cluster in your infrastructure by providing step-by-step configuration and consideration guides focussing on optimizing the performance and security of your setup.

Network verification is a rapidly emerging technology that is a key part of Intent Based Networking (IBN). Verification can help avoid outages, facilitate compliance processes and accelerate change windows. Full-feature verification solutions require an underlying mathematical model of network behavior to analyze and reason about policy objectives and network designs. A mathematical model, as opposed to monitoring or testing live traffic, can perform exhaustive and definitive analysis of network implementations and behavior, including proving network isolation or security rules.

In this paper, we will describe how verification can be used in key IT processes and workflows, why a mathematical model is required and how it works, as well as example use cases from the Forward Enterprise platform. This will also clarify what requirements a mathematical model must meet and how to evaluate alternative products.

ESG research recently uncovered that 66% of organizations view their IT environments as more or significantly more complex than they were two years ago. The complexity will most likely increase, since 46% of organizations anticipate their network infrastructure spending to exceed that of 2018 as they upgrade and expand their networks.

Large enterprise and service provider networks consist of multiple device types—routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers—with proprietary operating systems (OS) and different configuration rules. As organizations support more applications and users, their networks will grow and become more complex, making it more difficult to verify and manage correctly implemented policies across the entire network. Organizations have also begun to integrate public cloud services with their on-premises networks, adding further network complexity to manage end-to-end policies.

With increasing network complexity, organizations cannot easily confirm that their networks are operating as intended when they implement network and security policies. Moreover, when considering a fix to a service-impact issue or a network update, determining how it may impact other applications negatively or introduce service-affecting issues becomes difficult. To assess adherence to policies or the impact of any network change, organizations have typically relied on disparate tools and material—network topology diagrams, device inventories, vendor-dependent management systems, command line (CLI) commands, and utilities such as “ping” and “traceroute.” The combination of these tools cannot provide a reliable and holistic assessment of network behavior efficiently.

Organizations need a vendor-agnostic solution that enables network operations to automate the verification of network implementations against intended policies and requirements, regardless of the number and types of devices, operating systems, traffic rules, and policies that exist. The solution must represent the topology of the entire network or subsets of devices (e.g., in a region) quickly and efficiently. It should verify network implementations from prior points in time, as well as proposed network changes prior to implementation. Finally, the solution must also enable organizations to quickly detect issues that affect application delivery or violate compliance requirements.

Because Forward Enterprise automates the intelligent analysis of network designs, configurations and state, we provide an immediate and verifiable return on investment (ROI) in terms of accelerating key IT processes and reducing manhours of highly skilled engineers in troubleshooting and testing the network.

In this paper, we will quantify the ROI of a large financial services firm and document the process improvements that led to IT cost savings and a more agile network. In this analysis, we will look at process improvements in trouble ticket resolution, audit-related fixes and acceleration of network updates and change windows. We will explore each of these areas in more detail, along with the input assumptions for the calculations, but for this financial services customer, the following benefits were achieved, resulting in an annualized net savings of over $3.5 million.