Blog Posts in February 2015

Scaling Overlay Networks: Scale-Out Control Plane

A week or so ago I described why a properly implemented hypervisor-based overlay virtual networking data plane is not a scalability challenge; even though the performance might decrease slightly as the total number of forwarding entries grow, modern implementations easily saturate 10GE server uplinks.

Scalability of the central controller or orchestration system is a totally different can of worms. As I explained in the Scaling Overlay Networks, the only approach that avoids single failure domain and guarantees scalability is scale-out control plane architecture.

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Let’s Get Rid of the Thick Yellow Cable

Whenever I write about the crazy things vendors are trying to sell us, and the kludges we have to live with, I keep wondering, “Is it just me, or is the whole industry really as ridiculous as it seems?” It’s so nice to see someone else coming to the same conclusions, like Mark Burgess (the author of CFEngine and the Promise Theory) did in a lengthy essay on whether SDN makes sense.

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RFC 7454: BGP Operations and Security

After almost exactly three years of struggles our BGP Operations and Security draft became RFC 7454 – a cluebat (as Gert Doering put it) you can use on your customers and peers to help them fix their BGP setup.

Without Jerome Durand this document would probably remain forever stuck in the draft phase. It’s amazing how many hurdles one has to jump over to get something published within IETF. Thanks a million Jerome, you did a fantastic job!

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Performance of Hypervisor-Based Overlay Virtual Networking

Years ago I managed to saturate a 10GE uplink on a vSphere server I tested with a single Linux VM using less than one vCPU. On the other hand, squeezing 1 Gbps out of Open vSwitch using GRE encapsulation was called ludicrous speed not so long ago. Implementing overlay virtual networking in the hypervisor obviously carries a huge performance penalty, right? Not so fast…

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Hands-On Tail-F Experience on Software Gone Wild

Tail-F NCS implements one of the most realistic approaches to service abstraction (the cornerstone of SDN – at least in my humble opinion) – an orchestration system that automates service provisioning on existing infrastructure.

Is the product really as good as everyone claims? How hard is it to use? How steep is the learning curve? Boštjan Šuštar and Marko Tišler from NIL Data Communications have months of hands-on experience and were willing to share it in Episode 22 of Software Gone Wild.

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Scaling Overlay Networks: Distributed Data Plane

Thou Shalt Have No Chokepoints” is one of those simple scalability rules that are pretty hard to implement in real-life products. In the Distributed Data Plane part of Scaling Overlay Networks webinar I listed data plane components that can be easily distributed (layer-2 and layer-3 switching), some that are harder to implement but still doable (firewalling) and a few that are close to mission-impossible (NAT and load balancing).

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Let’s Meet in Zurich or Heidelberg

I’ll be speaking at two conferences in March: SDN event in Zurich organized by fantastic Gabi Gerber, and the best boutique security conference – Troopers 15 in Heidelberg. If you’ll be attending one of these events, just grab me, drag me to the nearest coffee table, and throw some interesting questions my way ;) … and if you happen to be near one of these locations, let me know and we might figure out how to meet somewhere.

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Combining MPLS/VPN, MPLS-TE and QoS on MPLS Talks

In the final part of our MPLS-focused discussion (now part of MPLS Essentials webinar), Seamus wanted to know how one could combine MPLS/VPN, MPLS-TE and QoS (for example, sending VoIP traffic for one customer over a different path).

Short answer: don’t even think about doing that. The added complexity is not worth whatever extra money you’ll be charging the customer (or not).

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Before Talking about vMotion across Continents, Read This

I expect to hear a lot about the “wonderful” idea of moving running VMs 100 msec away (across the continent) in the upcoming weeks. I would recommend you read a few of my older blog posts before considering it… and don’t waste time trying to persuade the true believers with technical arguments – talk with whoever will foot the bill or walk away.

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Big Cloud Fabric: Scaling OpenFlow Fabric

I’m still convinced that architectures with centralized control planes (and that includes solutions relying on OpenFlow controllers) cannot scale. On the other hand, Big Switch Networks is shipping Big Cloud Fabric, and they claim they solved the problem. Obviously I wanted to figure out what’s going on and Andy Shaw and Rob Sherwood were kind enough to explain the interesting details of their solution.

Long story short: Big Switch Networks significantly extended OpenFlow.

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