Presentation from South Florida VMUG

Monday, July 2, 2012 in Networking, Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

Back in early March I was invited to speak at the South Florida VMUG, and I gave this presentation on vSphere networking challenges and solutions. The idea behind the presentation was to give attendees some visibility into IEEE and IETF efforts at creating new network technologies and protocols. I’m posting it here just in case someone might find it useful or helpful.

As always, your questions, corrections, or clarifications are welcome in the comments below.

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  1. Paul’s avatar

    Paul on Monday, July 2, 2012 at 4:11 pm

    So this might be a silly question but I’ll ask it anyway; if we could vMotion through layer 3 would this give us more flexibility in data centre design scenarios? Then we could do vMotions over longer distances without having to use a stretched VLAN.

  2. slowe’s avatar

    slowe on Tuesday, July 3, 2012 at 11:05 am

    Paul, that’s not a silly question at all. The limitation is not vMotion; you can actually perform a vMotion through a Layer 3 gateway. (It’s just not supported, as far as I know.) The limitation is preserving the IP addresses of the VMs when they move from one host to another, and that causes network architects to have to extend the Layer 2 domains—which are typically associated with an IP subnet—to all locations where a VM might potentially move. Dynamic VLAN provisioning with EVB helps a little bit, but for longer distance migrations we need LISP and related protocols to solve the IP routing issues created by VM mobility.

    I hope this helps!