A TRILL-based multi-tenant data center network

Abstract

To achieve an efficient ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) service, virtualized data centers have to provide large-scale multi-tenancy services and to meet new requirements in terms of efficiency and availability. The main limitation of current network architectures mainly comes from inadequate design standards, such as those for Ethernet Bridging (802.1D) and Virtual LAN (802.1Q), which were not designed to handle large numbers of tenants and the resulting traffic volumes.In this paper, we present a TRILL based multi-tenant network architecture for virtualized data center networks. Through the TRILL protocol, this architecture achieves the best of both layers (bridging and routing), thus building a large-scale layer-2 network while ensuring scalability, efficiency, fault-tolerance and simplified management. In addition, this architecture integrates the VNT (Virtual Network over TRILL) solution, enabling the creation of large numbers of logical networks within a virtualized data center. The complete implementation of our solution is currently deployed and running in the GANDI public cloud infrastructure.Experimental evaluations show that VNT is able to support several hundreds of switches, thousands of physical nodes, and hundreds of thousands of tenants with only negligible overhead, all with very minimal configuration which may be completely automated. VNT additionally permits backward compatibility with both traditional layer-2 equipment as well as newer hardware supporting TRILL.