Practical SDN with Pertino

I don’t know if Software Defined Networking is a legitimate thing I should pursue, or just another mine in the IT requisition battlefield I need to be aware of. If it’s something I should pursue, what is the scope, budget, risks, and payoff? And what do I need to buy exactly? With x86 virtualization, it was clear (powerful pizza boxes! Lots of RAM!), with network virtualization…not so much.

I do know this much: the traditional, monolithic & inflexible business WAN causes me pain and suffering.

You know the type, or maybe in your career, you’ve moved on from such environments. But many of us haven’t. Remember this thing? The Business WAN:

Yeah baby. It’s still kicking after all these years…you get yourself some T1s for the branches, 10MegE/100MegE for the tentpole sites, some Cisco routers, OSPF & maybe MPLS to tie it all together with a safe, predictable RFC-1918 ipv4 address scheme and NAT on the ASA edge device. Active Directory is usually built on top with a replication topology matching the sites’ /24s.

And on the seventh day, the young engineer stood back and beheld what he had built, and said, Go forth IT department, and let thy services & value multiply: Exchange, Sharepoint, SMB shares, SANs, QOS policies, print servers, a Squid caching server here, a Peplink there, oh my!

This model is straight out of the 1990s playbook, but it’s still in wide-use. In the meantime, a crazy thing happened, the internet came along and for some inscrutable reason, it’s really popular, accessible and useful, and people like it. Your thought your advanced Business WAN was hot stuff, but your users feel it’s positively archaic because they have 20 megabits of bandwidth on their tiny 4G LTE phone, limitless storage & bandwidth via the Dropboxes & Googles of the world, and an internet that’s never under maintenance and never tells them no.

This then, is the problem I want SDN to solve: take the stuff my users need that’s on the business WAN and put it where my users are: on the internet. 443 doesn’t work for everything and while cloud is the ultimate home, I’m looking for baby-steps to the cloud, things I can do today with SDN that are low-risk and potentially high-reward. 

What do you do hotshot? 

Once upon a time in the Microsoft world, there was a thing called Direct Access. This was a software-defined solution that eased access to corporate resources for users on the internet. Without initiating a VPN connection, your C-level could access that stubborn decade-old UNC path from his laptop anywhere on the internet. IPV6 to the rescue!

But it was somewhat painful to install, especially in multi-domain scenarios, and sadly, only worked on Windows, which was great 10 years ago, but we’re not in a world where the PC is increasing in relevance; we’re in a world where the PC is less relevant by the day.

Enter Pertino, which to the cynical is yet another SDN startup from the Valley, but to me, is the among the first vendors wearing the badge SDN that actually knows my WAN pain and is building something SDN-related that is imminently practical and immediately applicable.

Pertino bills itself as a Cloud VPN provider, which, I think, doesn’t do it justice. VPN calls to mind dial-up…remote users connecting to your LAN. Pertino is sort of the opposite: this bit of tech allows you to extend your WAN/LAN into the cloud effortlessly.

I’m pretty jazzed on it because I think Pertino, or something like it, could be the next evolution in business WAN networking, especially if your organization is cloud-cautious. 

So What is it?

Pertino is essentially an ipv4 & ipv6 overlay technology employing NVGRE-like encapsulation dubbed “Overpass” that works with your existing on-prem equipment and extends securely your Layer 2/Layer 3 LAN assets to the places where your users are: the internet.

It’s so simple too. All you need is a modest 16 megabyte application that, to your users, will remain largely invisible. Once installed, Pertino sits quietly in the Windows system tray or in the background on Android and just generally stays out of the way, which makes it about 10x better than dial-up style VPNs of yesteryear.

While that application is low drama, what’s happening behind the scenes is some serious high stakes vKung-Fu, involving on-demand VMs, virtual switches, control & data planes and encapsulation.

On the Windows side, Pertino creates a simple virtual network interface, hooks onto your existing internet connection and begins a session with a Pertino virtual machine in a datacenter somewhere, in theory, close to your device.

All traffic on that vif is encapsulated via the NVGRE-like Overpass and your Windows client or Android handset is assigned both an ipv4 & ipv6 address. And just like that, you have what is in effect a fully switched LAN on the internet, to the point where an arp lookup sees other MAC addresses of other Pertino-enabled devices wherever they are.

Just think about that for a second. In years past, you’d have to call up your provider and order an exotic Virtual Private Wire Service to extend Layer 2 across a Layer 3 link if you wanted to expose your MAC addresses to the remote end.

Now I’m doing in effect the same thing with a simple Windows application. And I didn’t have to hire a consultant or mess around with NAT or the ASA, which is both comforting in that I like my security blanket, yet terrifying at the same time because it’s ipv6ing its way over my firewall. Pertino is essentially giving me a layer 2 switch….in the cloud.

In the Layer 3 space, your ipv4 address isn’t RFC-1918, but it’s not routable either. You can have any ipv4 address you like as long as it’s 50.203.x.x. Pertino is using Overpass encapsulation here to isolate tenants & customers from each other, reminding me of the way Microsoft uses NVGRE in Hyper-V & Azure.

After installing Pertino, you’re going to look at the output of ipconfig or ifconfig and say, “Wait. They gave me an entire /24?” Indeed, it seems you have a /24 but it’s not routable or unique. Another Pertino customer is probably getting the same /24. That’s what’s cool about encapsulation.

On your ipv6 Pertino network, things are a little more hazy. I think ipv6 is also NVGRE-encapsulated and perhaps all customers share the same /64, but while I’m a willing conscript in Tom Hollingsworth’s army of ipv6 boosters, I’m not smart enough to speak to how it works with Pertino. I know this: I can’t ping that ipv6 address from a non-Pertino client, yet the address differs substantially from the one my Windows 8.1 & 2012 R2 clients assign my NIC, which I can’t ping either.

So whatever man. It’s ipv6 and it’s mysterious.

What can you do with this? 

Last fall I was hot on Pertino because I envisioned using it at scale in a modern business WAN: imagine being able to kill your expensive, continent-hopping MPLS network without having to revamp your entire infrastructure.

I’m not sure Pertino could do that, but still: the mind races.

Pertino supports this:

• Active Directory joins 
• AD replication
• Bind your DNS server to it
• As much as I hate to see it because I think it encourages bad behavior (printing), you can do print servers over this

I’ve been using Pertino in the Daisetta Lab and quietly at work for about five months. With it, I’ve done this:

• Built an Domain Controller in AWS somewhere in Virginia, joined & promoted it as a DC with the DC in my Daisetta Lab
• SMB (CIFS to the non Microsoft crowd) shares via common UNC paths
• Remote desktop, ssh
• Mounted LUN in remote datacenter via iSCSI and MS iSCSI Initiator and ran IOMETER over Pertino
  • Just kidding

Performance

So you’ve got your fancy Pertino adapters deployed to laptops, mobile phones, iPads, and certain strategic servers, you’re living the SDN dream with only a modest OpEx spend and no rip & replace and your users can finally access CIFS, Sharepoint, and other internal resources from whatever internet connection they have.

How’s this baby perform?

Couple of measurements:

[table]

Test Type, Details, Time, Subjective Feeling

SMB File Copy, Copied 104MB file from remote site, 10 minutes 3 seconds, Felt slow but was evening hours at home

SMB File copy, Copied 95MB of random files from remote site, 3 minutes 46 seconds, Felt much faster speed varied 400k to 1mb/s

Latency tests, Simple pings to remote pertino  clients, 90ms minimum/300ms max, Was variable but mostly similar to standard VPN perofrmance

RDP, 2560×1440 remote desktop session, Session connected in 10s or so, Better that expected artifacting and compression minor

[/table]

Not bad

There’s room for improvement here, but I’m on the free tier of Pertino service. The company offers some enhancements for paying customers, but Pertino’s not something you deploy as Tier 1 infrastructure; this is better used to fill gaps between your infrastructure and your users, and as such, I think the performance is acceptable.

It’s at least as fast as what my users call the “stupid VPN,” so what’s not to like?

Reliability

I’ve been using Pertino now for almost five months. I’d give them an A- for reliability.

I’ve been trying to push this review out for months, but it’s so easy to forget Pertino’s there. 99.9% of hte time, it’s invisible and just running in the background, connecting me seamlessly to whatever remote device I need to access.

There have been only two times the network failed me. Once, briefly in January I couldn’t RDP into the home network, and then, last week, there was an hours-long outage affecting many Pertino customers.

Credit to Pertino here: the same day they blogged about the outage, its cause and promised to make it better. Essentially a Pertino datacenter went offline, which they can recover from, but the resulting failover process snowballed and a widespread outage resulted:

On the afternoon of April 1st, there was a network outage between a cluster of data plane v-switches and the control plane, which was located in a different cloud datacenter. The disruption was brief, but lasted long enough for the control plane to consider those v-switches at risk. So, the control plane began migrating customers to other v-switches.

However, due to a new bug in the data plane, too many messages were sent from the data plane v-switches to the control plane, increasingly loading it with requests.

 

It’s been so reliable that after carefully considering the options, I had no problem recommending Pertino to my own parent partition, dad, a radio engineer by trade & reluctant IT consultant, as he often needs to connect small, distant radio stations to each other over IP. Usually he purchases a Zywall appliance, connects the sites together via VPN and with LogMeIn, he can remotely support these small operations. 

Pertino is an obvious fit for scenarios like that as well, and it’s probably cheaper.

Cost

Back when I first was testing Pertino, they allowed you to install the package on up to three devices for free. It looks like that plan is gone now,

Pertino still offers a free account for IT pros to sink their teeth into: with it, you can add Peritno on up to three devices to see how this works.

After that, the base level pricing for Pertino is $29/month for up to 10 devices. It scales from there, but only modestly: enterprise packaging starts at 40+ devices and you have to contact them to get pricing.

One gets the feeling that perhaps this is aimed at really small SMB markets, but I’m not so sure. If you have 1500+ objects in Active Directory, you surely don’t need Pertino on all of them. Just certain strategic, edge-focused & secured ones: a Domain Controller & SMB server here, a few executive or important mobile user laptops there. You get the idea.

Up to 40 devices can be connected through Pertino for about $90 per month.

Conclusion

All in all, I’ve been pretty impressed with this kit. It’s at once a practical way to get your on-prem services out to your users, dip your toes into some ipv6 waters even if you’re not engineering it yourself, and leverage some real software defined networking (insert definition of that here) in a safe, low-risk way.

In fact, I think you should help me test it a bit more. If you’re a fellow tech blogger with a lab at home and you’re interested in this or suffer from WAN pains too, let’s link up: The Supervisor Module spouse isn’t interested in becoming a test user on my Pertino network, but if you are, shoot me an email . I can add you as a user on my Pertino network, you can join a VM to my Pertino switch, and we can have a sort of home lab Apollo-Soyuz moment and learn something together.

Epilogue

Crazy timing, but within minutes of me posting my review of Pertino’s CloudVPN tech yesterday, Scott Lowe, a well-known rockstar virtualization blogger weighed in with his views of Pertino on Twitter:

The concept behind @PertinoNetworks is cool, but I’m not terribly impressed w/ the implementation thus far. A bit too simplistic, I think.

— Scott S. Lowe (@scott_lowe) April 7, 2014

I hope I don’t appear to be a Pertino shill and no disrespect to Scott intended, but I don’t think there’s anything “simplistic” about what is in effect a layer 2 switch in the cloud.

Okay, let’s suppose it’s a dumb switch.

Still. A dumb switch…in the cloud is something much more than a dumb switch in your rack.

Maybe I’m just easily impressed and Scott should show me how simplistic it is by joining my Pertino network. 😀

Disclosure

When I first signed up for the 3 device free Pertino service in the fall, a customer agent reached out to me to see if I had good experience. I relayed my experiences, linked to this blog and Pertino executives took notice. They offered me the use of up to 9 devices fro free on my Pertino network if I would post an unedited & unreviewed blog about my experiences with the product. No other compensation was given and no Pertino employees viewd the content of this post prior to its publication. 

You can read my disclosure policy here.