Summer is over and it is time to get back to work. As some of you may have noted, I am a bit behind schedule on my blogs. I did not intend to “take the summer” off, but it kind of worked out that way this year on the blog front. As we approach Labor Day, the traditional start of fall, football (the American version), back to school…and for the geeks of the world it is “Trade show Season.” Yes, that time of year when we announce our new products, run around the world giving talks and telling IT managers what new tools we have created for them to use.
This past week in “Fabulous Las Vegas,” as the sign says, we kicked of the trade show season with VMworld. It was a great week and some very cool things were announced and demoed at this year’s show. The two biggest things seem to be Solid State Disk (SSD) and overlay networking via Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN). VXLANs will help simplify networks and help integrate data centers, public and private clouds with on-demand overlay networking. The analogy used by VMware is with VXLAN you can now take VXLANs layer 2 packets and encapsulate them in a layer 3 protocol to span local and remote networks in a single virtual network. You can also do the following:
- Use MAC-in-UDP encapsulation to build the overlay network that can span across L3 networks.
- Use of MAC-in-UDP allows efficient load-sharing with the existing data center networks due to the use of Equal Cost Multi-pathing (ECMP) in the core networks
- Allows overlapping of VMs MAC and IP addresses using VXLAN Network identifier
- Takes advantage of efficient multicast protocols such as IGMP and PIM for VM’s broadcast and multicast communication needs
More details in this Citrix blog and this VMware blog.
Emulex is working with VMware and a number of industry partners to support overlay networking models. We see this as a viable option to make virtual networking simple and scalable for the cloud. We have over 100 events across the globe between now and December. Trade show season is upon us, and I look forward to seeing you at on the road.
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