NVLAN: A Novel VLAN Technology for Scalable Multi-tenant Datacenter Networks

Nowadays, cloud providers of "Infrastructure as a service" require datacenter networks to support virtualization and multi-tenancy at large scale, while it brings a grand challenge to datacenters. Traditional network technologies of datacenters and common commodity devices of network can not meet these new needs. In this paper, we present NVLAN, a novel VLAN technology for scalable multi-tenant datacenter networks. NVLAN eliminates the quantity limitation of logic isolated networks on VLAN through a slight modification. NVLAN can be applied to very large-scale datacenter networks, without the need of expensive and dedicated switches. Through encapsulation of tenant\´s packets, NVLAN provides tenants with full address space virtualization to configure their own logic network. We implemented NVLAN on a test bed, and demonstrated that it can be scaled up to large numbers of multi-tenant networks with negligible overhead.