Response: The Need For Stretched VLANs (@ioshints)

A recent post from Ivan Pepelnjak entitled Revisited: The Need For Stretched VLANs made me smile rather bitterly as Ivan dug into the apparent continued desire for stretched layer 2 networks and the reasons people give for the solution’s requirement and validity. I love a good bit of snark as much as the next nerd, so as you can imagine, I’m all over that post.

However, I confess I did wince slightly – in the way one might do when an old wound is poked with a sharp stick – as Ivan made a passing sarcastic reference to Microsoft’s amazing Network Load Balancing technology:

My mind was thrown back to the heady days of 2009 when I stumbled across another post from Mr Pepelnjak, this time entitled Turn a switch into a hub … the Microsoft Way which bemoaned the unadulterated stupidity of Microsoft’s attempt to use layer 2 network flooding to accomplish clustering. I had discovered the nature of this behavior at a previous client and had my mind blown by the very stupid and non-standards-compliant way in which this had been implemented.

The reason my mind went to that post, however, is because if I recall correctly it’s the first of Ivan’s posts that I ever commented on:

Once more, we prove the maxim that everything old is new again.

Thanks for the (slightly agonizing) trip down memory lane, Ivan!