VXVDE: A Switch-Free VXLAN Replacement

Abstract

The original VLAN standard (802.1Q) has proveninadequate with regard to the scalability needs of multitenancy environments (cloud computing). One approach to overcoming this limitation is the Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) specification. A shortcoming of VXLAN is the requirement of and overhead from daemons running on the host operating system (Virtual Tunnel End PointS). We present Virtual Extensible VDE (VXVDE), an evolutionary merging of the VXLAN philosophy with the Virtual Square lab's Virtual Distributed Ethernet tool. VXVDE requires neither daemons nor virtual switches, eliminating the extra layer of communication required by XVLANs. In addition to super simple network configuration VXVDE extends the notion of assigning IP addresses to network controllers by allowing each Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) to be assigned their own IP multicast address. Hence under VXVDE, each VMM becomes the true network communication endpoint in an environment that supports up to 16 million logical networks per IP multicast address and per port number.