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Examining Some Networking-Virtualization Chimeras

Tuesday, December 11, 2012 in Interoperability, Networking, Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

I like to spend time examining the areas where different groups of technologies intersect. Personally, I find this activity fascinating, and perhaps that’s the reason that I find myself pursing knowledge and experience in virtualization, networking, storage, and other areas simultaneously—it’s an effort to spend more time “on the border” between various technologies.

One border, in particular, is very interesting to me: the border between virtualization and networking. Time spent thinking about the border between networking and virtualization is what has generated posts like this one, this one, or this one. Because I’m not a networking expert (yet), most of the stuff I generate is junk, but at least it keeps me entertained—and it occasionally prods the Really Smart Guys (RSGs) to post something far more intelligent than anything I can create.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking more about some of these networking-virtualization chimeras, and I thought it might be interesting to talk about them, if for no other reason than to encourage the RSGs to correct me and help everyone understand a little better.

<aside>A chimera, by the way, was a mythological fire-breathing creature that was part lion, part goat, and part serpent; more generically, the word refers to any sort of organism that has two groups of genetically distinct cells. In layman’s terms, it’s something that is a mix of two other things.</aside>

Here are some of the networking-virtualization chimeras I’ve concocted:

  • FabricPath/TRILL on the hypervisor: See this blog post for more details. It turns out, at least at first glance, that this particular combination doesn’t seem to buy us much. The push for large L2 domains that seemed to fuel FabricPath and TRILL now seems to be abating in favor of network overlays and L3 routing.

  • MPLS-in-IP on the hypervisor: I also wrote about this strange concoction here. At first, I thought I was being clever and sidestepping some issues by bringing MPLS support into the hypervisor, but in thinking more about this I realize I’m wrong. Sure, we could encapsulate VM-to-VM traffic into MPLS, then encapsulate MPLS in UDP, but how is that any better than just encapsulating VM-to-VM traffic in VXLAN? It isn’t. (Not to mention that Ivan Pepelnjak set the record straight.)

  • LISP on the hypervisor: I thought this was a really good idea; by enabling LISP on the hypervisor and essentially making the hypervisor an ITR/ETR (see here for more LISP info), inter-DC vMotion becomes a snap. Want to use a completely routed access layer? No problem. Of course, that assumes all your WAN and data center equipment are LISP-capable and enabled/configured for LISP. I’m not the only one who thought this idea was cool, either. I’m sure there are additional problems/considerations of which I’m not aware, though—networking gurus, want to chime in and educate me on what I’m missing?

  • OTV on the hypervisor: This one isn’t really very interesting, as it bears great similarity to VXLAN (both OTV and VXLAN, to my knowledge, use very similar frame formats and encapsulation schemes). Is there something else here I’m missing?

  • VXLAN on physical switches: This one is interesting, even necessary according to some experts. Enabling VXLAN VTEP (VXLAN Tunnel End Point) termination on physical switches might also address some of the odd traffic patterns that would result from the use of VXLAN (see here for a simple example). Arista Networks demonstrated this functionality at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, so this particular networking-virtualization mashup is probably closer to reality than any of the others.

  • OpenFlow on the hypervisor: Open vSwitch (OVS) already supports OpenFlow, so you might say that this mashup already exists. It’s not unreasonable to think Nicira might port OVS to VMware vSphere, which would bring an OpenFlow-compatible virtual switch to a much larger installed base. The missing piece is, of course, an OpenFlow controller. While an interesting mental exercise, I’m keenly interested to know what sort of real-world problems this might help solve, and would love to hear from any OpenFlow experts out there what they think.

  • Virtualizing physical switches: No, I’m not talking about running switch software on the hypervisor (think Nexus 1000V). Instead, I’m thinking more along the lines of FlowVisor, which in effect virtualizes a switch’s control plane so that multiple “slices” of a switch can be independently controlled by an external OpenFlow controller. If you’re familiar with NetApp, think of their “vfiler” construct, or think of the Virtual Device Contexts (VDCs) in a Nexus 7000. However, I’m thinking of something more device-independent than Nexus 7000 VDCs. As more and more switches move to x86 hardware, this seems like it might be something that could really take off. Multi-tenancy support (each “virtual switch instance” being independently managed), traffic isolation, QoS, VLAN isolation…lots of possibilities exist here.

Are there any other groupings that are worth exploring or discussing? Any other “you got your virtualization peanut butter in my networking chocolate” combinations that might help address some of the issues in data centers today? Feel free to speak up in the comments below. Courteous comments are invited and encouraged.

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Technology Short Take #23

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 in Linux, Microsoft, Networking, Security, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 5 comments

Welcome to Technology Short Take #23, another collection of links and thoughts related to data center technologies like networking, storage, security, cloud computing, and virtualization. As usual, we have a fairly wide-ranging collection of items this time around. Enjoy!

Networking

  • A couple of days ago I learned that there are a couple open source implementations of LISP (Locator/ID Separation Protocol). There’s OpenLISP, which runs on FreeBSD, and there’s also a project called LISPmob that brings LISP to Linux. From what I can tell, LISPmob appears to be a bit more focused on the endpoint than OpenLISP.
  • In an earlier post on STT, I mentioned that STT’s re-use of the TCP header structure could cause problems with intermediate devices. It looks like someone has figured out how to allow STT through a Cisco ASA firewall; the configuration is here.
  • Jose Barreto posted a nice breakdown of SMB Multichannel, a bandwidth-enhancing feature of SMB 3.0 that will be included in Windows Server 2012. It is, unexpectedly, only supported between two SMB 3.0-capable endpoints (which, at this time, means two Windows Server 2012 hosts). Hopefully additional vendors will adopt SMB 3.0 as a network storage protocol. Just don’t call it CIFS!
  • Reading this article, you might deduce that Ivan really likes overlay/tunneling protocols. I am, of course, far from a networking expert, but I do have to ask: at what point does it become necessary (if ever) to move some of the intelligence “deeper” into the stack? Networking experts everywhere advocate the “complex edge-simple core” design, but does it ever make sense to move certain parts of the edge’s complexity into the core? Do we hamper innovation by insisting that the core always remain simple? As I said, I’m not an expert, so perhaps these are stupid questions.
  • Massimo Re Ferre posted a good article on a typical VXLAN use case. Read this if you’re looking for a more concrete example of how VXLAN could be used in a typical enterprise data center.
  • Bruce Davie of Nicira helps explain the difference between VPNs and network virtualization; this is a nice companion article to his colleague’s post (which Bruce helped to author) on the difference between network virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN).
  • The folks at Nicira also collaborated on this post regarding software overhead of tunneling. The results clearly favor STT (which was designed to take advantage of NIC offloading) over GRE, but the authors do admit that as “GRE awareness” is added to the cards that protocol’s performance will improve.
  • Oh, and while we’re on the topic of SDN…you might have noticed that VMware has taken to using the term “software-defined” to describe many of the services that vSphere (and related products) provide. This includes the use of software-defined networking (SDN) to describe the functionality of vSwitches, distributed vSwitches, vShield, and other features. Personally, I think that the term software-based networking (SBN) is far more applicable than SDN to what VMware does. It is just me?
  • Brad Hedlund wrote this post a few months ago, but I’m just now getting around to commenting about it. The gist of the article—forgive me if I munge it too much, Brad—is that the use of open source software components might dramatically change the shape/way/means in which networking protocols and standards are created and utilized. If two components are communicating over the network via open source components, is some sort of networking standard needed to avoid being “proprietary”? It’s an interesting thought, and goes to show the power of open source on the IT industry. Great post, Brad.
  • One more mention of OpenFlow/SDN: it’s great technology (and I’m excited about the possibilities that it creates), but it’s not a silver bullet for scalability.

Security

  • I came across this interesting post on a security attack based on VMDKs. It’s quite an interesting read, even if the probability of being able to actually leverage this attack vector is fairly low (as I understand it).

Storage

  • Chris Wahl has a good series on NFS with VMware vSphere. You can catch the start of the series here. One comment on the testing he performs in the “Same Subnet” article: if I’m not mistaken, I believe the VMkernel selection is based upon which VMkernel interface is listed in the first routing table entry for the subnet. This is something about which I wrote back in 2008, but I’m glad to see Chris bringing it to light again.
  • George Crump published this article on using DCB to enhance iSCSI. (Note: The article is quite favorable to Dell, and George discloses an affiliation with Dell at the end of the article.) One thing I did want to point out is that—if I recall correctly—the 802.1Qbb standard for Priority Flow Control only defines a single “no drop” class of service (CoS). Normally that CoS is assigned to FCoE traffic, but in an environment without FCoE you could assign it to iSCSI. In an environment with both, that could be a potential problem, as I see it. Feel free to correct me in the comments if my understanding is incorrect.
  • Microsoft is introducing data deduplication in Windows Server 2012, and here is a good post providing an introduction to Microsoft’s deduplication implementation.
  • SANRAD VXL looks interesting—anyone have any experience with it? Or more detailed technical information?
  • I really enjoyed Scott Drummonds’ recent storage performance analysis post. He goes pretty deep into some storage concepts and provides real-world, relevant information and recommendations. Good stuff.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

  • After moving CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation, Citrix published this discourse on “open washing” and provides a set of questions to determine the “openness” of software projects with which you may become involved. While the article is clearly structured to favor Citrix and CloudStack, the underlying point—to understand exactly what “open source” means to your vendors—is valid and worth consideration.
  • Per the AWS blog, you can now export EC2 instances out of Amazon and into another environment, including VMware, Hyper-V, and Xen environments. I guess this kind of puts a dent in the whole “Hotel California” marketing play that some vendors have been using to describe Amazon.
  • Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few weeks, you’ve most likely heard about Nick Weaver’s Razor project. (If you haven’t heard about it, here’s Nick’s blog post on it.) To help with the adoption/use of Razor, Nick also recently announced an overview of the Razor API.

Virtualization

  • Frank Denneman continues to do a great job writing solid technical articles. The latest article to catch my eye (and I’m sure that I missed some) was this post on combining affinity rule types.
  • This is an interesting post on a vSphere 5 networking bug affecting iSCSI that was fixed in vSphere 5.0 Update 1.
  • Make a note of this VMware KB article regarding UDP traffic on Linux guests using VMXNET3; the workaround today is using E1000 instead.
  • This post is actually over a year old, but I just came across it: Luc Dekens posted a PowerCLI script that allows a user to find the maximum IOPS values over the last 5 minutes for a number of VMs. That’s handy. (BTW, I have fixed the error that kept me from seeing the post when it was first published—I’ve now subscribed to Luc’s blog.)
  • Want to use a Debian server to provide NFS for your VMware environment? Here is some information that might prove helpful.
  • Jeremy Waldrop of Varrow provides some information on creating a custom installation ISO for ESXi 5, Nexus 1000V, and PowerPath/VE. Cool!
  • Cormac Hogan continues to pump out some very useful storage-focused articles on the official VMware vSphere blog. For example, both the VMFS locking article and the article on extending an EagerZeroedThick disk were great posts. I sincerely hope that Cormac keeps up the great work.
  • Thanks to this Project Kronos page, I’ve been able to successfully set up XCP on Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS. Here’s hoping it gets easier in future releases.
  • Chris Colotti takes on some vCloud Director “challenges”, mostly surrounding vShield Edge and vCloud Director’s reliance on vShield Edge for specific networking configurations. While I do agree with many of Chris’ points, I personally would disagree that using vSphere HA to protect vShield Edge is an acceptable configuration. I was also unable to find any articles that describe how to use vSphere FT to protect the deployed vShield appliances. Can anyone point out one or more of those articles? (Put them in the comments.)
  • Want to use Puppet to automate the deployment of vCenter Server? See here.

I guess it’s time to wrap up now, lest my “short take” get even longer than it already is! Thanks for reading this far, and I hope that I’ve shared something useful with you. Feel free to speak up in the comments if you have questions, thoughts, or clarifications.

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Technology Short Take #15

Monday, October 3, 2011 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

Welcome to Technology Short Take #15, the latest in my irregular series of posts on various articles and links on networking, servers, storage, and virtualization—everything a growing data center engineer needs!

Networking

My thoughts this time around are pretty heavily focused on VXLAN, which continues to get lots of attention. I talked about posting a dissection of VXLAN, but I have failed miserably; fortunately, other people smarter than me have stepped up to the plate. Here are a few VXLAN-related posts and articles I’ve found over the last couple of weeks:

  • There is a three-part series over at Coding Relic that does a great job of explaining VXLAN, the components of VXLAN, and how it works. Here are the links to the series: part 1, part 2, and part 3. One note of clarification: in part 3 of the series, Denny talks about a VTEP gateway. Right now, the VTEP gateway is the server itself; anytime a packet on a VXLAN-enabled network leaves the physical server to go to a different physical server, it will be VXLAN-encapsulated. It won’t be decapsulated until it hits the destination VTEP (the ESXi server hosting the destination VM). If (when?) VXLAN awareness hits physical switches, then the possibility of a VTEP gateway existing outside the server exists. Personally, it kind of makes sense—to me, at least—to build VTEP gateway functionality into vShield Edge.
  • Some people aren’t quite so enamored with VXLAN; one such individual is Greg Ferro. I respect Greg a great deal, so it was interesting to me to read his article on why VXLAN is “full of fail”. Some of his comments are only slightly related to VXLAN (the rant over IEEE vs. IETF, for example), but Greg’s comment about VMware building a new standard instead of “leveraging the value of networking infrastructure” echoes some of my own thoughts. I understand that VXLAN accomplishes things that existing standards apparently do not, but was a new standard really necessary?
  • Omar Sultan of Cisco took the time to compile some questions and answers about VXLAN. One thing that is made more clear—for me, at least—in Omar’s post is the fact that VXLAN doesn’t address connectivity to the vApps from the “outside” world. While VXLAN provides a logical isolated network segment that can span multiple Layer 3 networks and allow applications to communicate with each other, VXLAN doesn’t address the Layer 3 addressing that must exist outside the VXLAN tunnel. In fact, in my discussions with some of the IETF draft authors at VMworld, they indicated that VXLAN would require a NAT device or a DNS update in order to address changes in externally-accessible applications. This, by the way, is why you’ll still need technologies like OTV and LISP (or their equivalents); see this post for more information on how VXLAN, OTV, and LISP are complementary. If I’m wrong, please feel free to correct me.
  • In case you’re still unclear about the key problem that VXLAN attempts to address, this quote from Ivan Pepelnjak might help (the full article is here):

    VXLAN tries to solve a very specific IaaS infrastructure problem: replace VLANs with something that might scale better. In a massive multi-tenant data center having thousands of customers, each one asking for multiple isolated IP subnets, you quickly run out of VLANs.

  • Finally, you might find this PDF helpful. Ignore the first 13 slides or so; they’re marketing fluff, to be honest. However, the remainder of the slides have some useful information on VXLAN and how it’s expected to be implemented.

Servers

I didn’t really stumble across anything strictly server hardware-related; either I’m just not plugged into the right resources (anyone want to make some recommendations?) or it was just a quiet period. I’ll assume it was the former.

Storage

Virtualization

  • Did you see this post about new network simulation functionality in VMware Workstation 8?
  • Here’s a good walk-through on setting up vMotion across multiple network interfaces.
  • VMware vSphere Design co-author Maish Saidel-Keesing has a post here on how to approximate the functionality of netstat on ESXi.
  • William Lam has a “how to” on installing the VMware VSA with running VMs.
  • Fellow vSpecialist Andre Leibovici did a write-up on a proof of concept that the vSpecialists did for a customer involving Vblock, VPLEX, and VDI. This was a pretty cool use case, in my opinion, and worth having a look if you need to design a highly available environment.
  • Thinking about playing with vShield 5? That’s a good idea, but check here to learn from the mistakes of others first. You’ll thank me later.
  • The question of defragmenting guest OS disks has come up again and again; here’s the latest take from Cormac Hogan of VMware. He makes some great points, but I suspect that this question is still far from settled.

It’s time to wrap up now; I hope that you found something useful. As always, thanks for reading! Feel free to share your views or thoughts in the comments below.

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