Interesting post, thank you, I am trying to be unbiased in these comments:

Regarding item #4

“Many early, first generation software-only LAN Emulation customers lead the Cisco ACI customer advisory board. LAN Emulation is a reference to ATM LAN Emulation which was the industry’s first attempt to faithfully reproduce an Ethernet physical network on top of another media. This sort of emulation technology has been tried and failed. The industry is still waiting for the public performance tests for unicast, multicast, and large layer 2 domains deployed in NSX.”

The problem with the above statement is the fact that technology at the time of ATM/LANE was not as advanced as today. Memory and CPUs did not have the same power as today. The basic concepts failed because of scalability of LANE (Ethernet’s broadcast domain) and many other issues (Cost/Economics - the cost of an Ethernet NIC). The approach was doomed from the very beginning. The NSX approach is native to the underlying protocols in the network. The scalability issues most likely can be overcome with today’s hardware technology/and future software technology. Servers/PCs/Compute platforms (and their underlying CPUs/Memory) are still following Moore’s law. Yes, software may be another matter, but it seems advancements are moving along.

Item #5

I agree that you cannot abstract the underlying connectivity away. This is a fire and blame method, VMware bias of Servers/Software vs. the Holistic Approach (which I think is the correct view) is evident here. One major DC firestorm caused by VMware NSX and its back to the methods which are true and tried, old and tried methods which work will win over…hey, let’s burn down the barn and see if that causes us to milk the cows faster, the cows will not be too happy about that, you may not be able to survive the stampede out of the barn!

Item #6

I agree that it’s a much more complicated world out there, and an open layer 4-7 ecosystem is the correct approach. One vendor does not have all the answers, its complicated world out there