Virtual networks get cloud standard boost

VMware and Cisco have teamed up to create a networking technology to manage large numbers of virtual networks within datacentres and across cloud environments.

VMware's Steve Herrod, pictured at VMworld, has announced the launch of the VXLAN technology, created in partnership with Cisco. Photo credit: Jay Greene/CNET News

The Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) technology, announced on Tuesday, gives networks a new way to address virtual LANs (VLANS), relaxing limits, speeding access and making them easier to move across a network.

"Just as our mobile phone numbers allow us to take calls virtually anywhere, separation of a machine's network ID from its physical location enables more mobility and efficiency for applications," VMware's chief technology officer, Stephen Herrod, wrote in a blog post. "Using 'MAC-in-UDP' encapsulation, VXLAN provides a Layer 2 abstraction to virtual machines, independent of where they are located."

The current standard, IEEE 802.1Q, can handle 4,096 VLANs. VXLAN extends that to over 16 million, and allows them to be distributed and moved over different address ranges while maintaining their logical identity. This substantially eases the work required to cohesively manage the large numbers of virtual networks that can be part of a single cloud entity. It does this by adding Layer 3-style routing to the Layer 2 low-level per-machine addressing used previously. 

VXLAN "is the first step in the path towards logical, software-based networks that can be created on demand, enabling enterprises to leverage capacity wherever it's available", Mallik Mahalingam, a principal engineer in VMware's vSphere network research and development division, wrote in a blog post.

"It completely untethers the VMs from physical networks by allowing VMs to communicate with each other using a transparent overlay scheme over physical networks that could span Layer 3 boundaries," he added.

VMware worked with Cisco, Arista, Broadcom, Red Hat and Intel on developing the technology, which has been published as an informational draft at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

"VXLAN will offer a network encapsulation technique with segment identifiers for creating millions of logical networks and for enabling workloads to seamlessly move across datacentres and cloud infrastructures," VMware said in a statement.

The VXLAN technology specification will be integrated as a beta into Cisco's virtual Nexus 1000V switch in September, VMware added. Cisco and VMware launched the Nexus 1000V, a software implementation of the Nexus switch, in September 2008. It is not known whether running VXLAN on the Nexus 1000V will carry a cost. The technology will also go into vCloud Director 1.5 and vShield 5.

Cisco also plans to integrate VMware vSphere 5 Auto Deploy with its Unified Computing System (UCS) 2.0 management software, VMware said, cutting the number of steps it takes to deploy vSphere nodes from a boot image.