Geneve – Ecosystem Support Has Arrived

[This post was authored by T. Sridhar and Jesse Gross.]

Earlier this year, VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat and Intel published an IETF draft on Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (Geneve). This draft (first published on Valentine’s Day no less) includes authors from the each of the first generation encapsulation protocols — VXLAN, NVGRE, and STT. However, beyond the obvious appeal of unification across hypervisor platforms, the salient feature of Geneve is that it was designed from the ground up to be flexible. Nobody wants an endless cycle of new encapsulation formats as network virtualization designs and controllers mature, certainly not the vendors that have to support the ever growing list of acronyms and RFCs.

Of course press releases, standards bodies and predictions about the future mean little without actual implementations, which is why it is important to consider the “ecosystem” from the beginning of the process. This includes software and silicon implementations in both commercial and open source varieties. This always takes time but since Geneve was designed to accommodate a wide variety of use cases it has seen a relatively quick uptake. Unsurprisingly, the first implementations that landed were open source software — including switches such as Open Continue reading

Physical Networks in the Virtualized Networking World

[This post was co-authored by Bruce Davie and Ken Duda]

Almost a year ago, we wrote a first post about our efforts to build virtual networks that span both virtual and physical resources. As we’ve moved beyond the first proofs of concept to customer trials for our combined solution, this post serves to provide an update on where we see the interaction between virtual and physical worlds heading.

Our overall approach to connecting physical and virtual resources can be viewed in two main categories:

• terminating the overlay on physical devices, such as top-of-rack switches, routers, appliances, etc.
• managing interactions between the overlay and the physical devices that provide the underlay.

The latter topic is something we’ve addressed in some other recent posts (here, here and here) — in this blog we’ll focus more on how we deal with physical devices at the edge of the overlay.

We first started working to design a control plane to terminate network virtualization overlays on physical devices in 2012. We started by looking at the information model, defining what information needed to be exchanged between a physical device and a network virtualization controller such as NSX. To bound the problem space, Continue reading

Network Virtualization Gets Physical

Network virtualization, as others have noted, is now well past the hype stage and in serious production deployments. One factor that has facilitated the adoption of network virtualization is the ease with which it can be incrementally deployed. In a typical data center, the necessary infrastructure is already in place. Servers are interconnected by a physical network that already meets the basic requirements for network virtualization: providing IP connectivity between the physical servers. And the servers are themselves virtualized, providing the ideal insertion point for network virtualization: the vswitch (virtual switch). Because the vswitch is the first hop in the data path for every packet that enters or leaves a VM, it’s the natural place to implement the data plane for network virtualization. This is the approach taken by VMware (and by Nicira before we were part of VMware) to enable network virtualization, and it forms the basis for our current deployments.

In typical data centers, however, not every machine is virtualized. “Bare metal” servers — that is, unvirtualized, or physical machines — are a fact of life in most real data centers. Sometimes they are present because they run software that is not easily virtualized, or because of Continue reading