TBL Networks, The Blinky Light

This is the Live Blog of INF-NET2161 – VMware Networking 2012 – Enabling the Software Defined Network. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

Speakers:

• Milin Desai – VMware, Inc. – Product Management, Networking
• Sachin Thakkar – VMware, Inc. – Manager, Networking and Security R&D

Software Defined Networking must provide an abstraction layer for the network similar to the way there is a hardware abstraction layer for virtual machines today. The goal is an operationally efficient environment to provision networks quickly and on-demand. With the release of vSphere 5.1 you can define logical networks with features such as vShield Edge, App, and Endpoint, and utilizing vXLAN technology. The vCloud ecosystem framework will allow 3^rd party partners to participate in Software Defined Networking with their own solutions. You can configure a vDC in minutes.

Deployment Scenario

• Create one subnet and connect multiple links to your ESXi hosts for redundancy (no need to trunk 100’s of VLAN’s)
• Create logical networks utilizing Software Defined Networking (vXLAN, vShield Edge, App, Endpoint)

Features like network healthcheck, rollback and recovery and VDS templates make the new distributed switch more robust than ever. Network administrators will be happy to know that the VDS also supports SPAN, RSPAN, ERSPAN, IPFIX/NETFLOW and SNMP. Also, for the first time the VDS supports LACP.

vXLAN allows you to carve up logical networks that run east / west between ESXi hosts without intermediary devices (other than L2 connectivity). Server offload cards are coming for vXLAN. L3 connectivity can be provided by the VMware vShield Edge virtual appliance as it acts as a vXLAN gateway. It can also act as a L2 VPN to a public cloud provider. There is also the capability to monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot vXLAN network traffic.

Virtual Datacenters are about multi-cluster compute. vCloud Director vDC’s can span multiple clusters. This is cloud computing at large scale. The rest of the presentation is dedicated to a live demo of vCloud Director. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you at the next session.