vyatta

I have been fiddling with Vyatta quite a bit recently in attempt to reduce our Cisco footprint in the datacenter.  Their solution has been the best fit for our needs that I can find.  One topic that the documentation didn't touch on much is that of "Port Forwarding" as most of us know it by.

Vyatta refers to this topic as DNAT, this requires that you have NAT enabled in your configuration.

  As many of us know our edge routing can get complex quickly.  Worst of all, it can get downright expensive when working with "high-end" propietary hardware such as Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, etc.  What this article is going to cover is a few ways to reduce your total cost of operations (TCO), streamline edge routing managability, and reduce your carbon footprint.  I for one work with a very complex Cisco environment which consists of WAN aggregation, load balanced and high availability firewalls, multiple subnets, and of course roadwarrior vpns.  The solutions presented in this article are all open source and provide all the needs that one would need to consilidate your Cisco equipment and feel better about yourself.  The major requirement of this peice is everything should configure and work properly in Vmware ESXi.  This article can be extended for Datacenter, Service Provider, Home Use, SMB use.  What I'm going to focus on is Home Use first, then a later date focus on full-on datacenter edge routing consolidation via Vyatta.