Distributed control plane for high performance switchbased VXLAN overlays

Author

Tripathi, Sunay ; Chickering, Roger ; Gainsley, Jonathan

Author_Institution

Pluribus Networks, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, USA

fYear

2015

fDate

7-8 May 2015

Firstpage

185

Lastpage

186

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a distributed network operating system that runs on merchant silicon based switches. Multiple switches can form a fabric for orchestration and state sharing purposes independent of the network topology. Each switch in a fabric shares its state with other switches over TCP/IP and keeps a global view of virtual ports along with topology to make individual switching, forwarding and encapsulation decisions. This allows the distributed switch OS to track Virtual Machines as they migrate and dynamically orchestrate VXLAN overlays without needing software overlays in servers. Since the Switch OS offloads encapsulation/decapsulation for VXLAN to the switch ASIC, there is no performance penalty.

Keywords

application specific integrated circuits; distributed control; local area networks; operating systems (computers); overlay networks; semiconductor switches; telecommunication network topology; transport protocols; virtual machines; virtual private networks; TCP/IP; VXLAN overlay; distributed network operating system; distributed switch OS; merchant silicon based switch; network topology; orchestration; state sharing; switch ASIC; switch OS off load decapsulation; switch OS off load encapsulation; virtual machine tracking; virtual port; Encapsulation; Fabrics; Hardware; Network operating systems; Servers; Silicon; Distributed Network OS; Netvisor; Overlay; VXLAN;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), 2015 ACM/IEEE Symposium on

Conference_Location

Oakland, CA

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ANCS.2015.7110132

Filename

7110132