Category: switching

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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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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VRF Lite on Nexus 5600

One of the networking engineers using my ExpertExpress to validate their network design had an interesting problem: he was building a multi-tenant VLAN-based private cloud architecture with each tenant having multiple subnets, and wanted to route within the tenant network as close to the VMs as possible (in the ToR switch).

He was using Nexus 5600 as the ToR switch, and although there’s conflicting information on the number of VRFs supported by that switch (verified topology: 25 VRFs, verified maximum: 1000 VRFs, configuration guide: 64 VRFs), he thought 25 VRFs (tenant routing domains) might be enough.

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Performance Tests and Out-of-Box Performance

Simonp made a perfectly valid point in a comment to my latest OVS blog post:

Obviously the page you're referring to is a quick-and-dirty benchmark. If you wanted the optimal numbers, you would have to tune quite a few parameters just like for hardware benchmarks (sysctl kernel parameters, Jumbo frames, ...).

While he’s absolutely right, this is not the performance data a typical user should be looking for.

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Snabb Switch Deep Dive on Software Gone Wild

The pilot episode of Software Gone Wild podcast featuring Snabb Switch created plenty of additional queries (and thousands of downloads) – it was obviously time for another deep dive episode discussing the intricate innards of this interesting virtual switch.

During the deep dive Luke Gorrie, the mastermind behind the Snabb Switch, answered a long list of questions, including:

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What Happened to “Be Conservative in What You Do”?

A comment by Pieter E. Smit on my vSphere Does Not Need LAG Bandaids post opened yet another can of worms: vSphere behavior on uplink recovery.

Short summary: vSphere starts using an uplink as soon as its physical layer becomes operational, which might happen during ToR switch startup phase, or before a ToR switch port enters forwarding state.

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Hyper-V 3.0 Extensible Virtual Switch

It took years before the rumored Cisco vSwitch materialized (in the form of Nexus 1000v), several more years before there was the first competitor (IBM Distributed Virtual Switch), and who knows how long before the third entrant (recently announced HP vSwitch) jumps out of PowerPoint slides and whitepapers into the real world.

Compare that to the Hyper-V environment, where we have at least two virtual switches (Nexus 1000V and NEC's PF1000) mere months after Hyper-V's general availability.

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Process, Fast and CEF Switching and Packet Punting

I’m probably flogging a fossilized skeleton of a long-dead horse, but it seems I never wrote about this topic before, so here it is (and you might want to read this book for more details).

Process switching is the oldest, simplest and slowest packet forwarding mechanism. Packets received on an interface trigger an interrupt, the interrupt handler identifies the layer-3 protocol based on layer-2 packet headers (example: Ethertype in Ethernet packets) and queues the packets to (user mode) packet forwarding processes (IP Input and IPv6 Input processes in Cisco IOS).

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