Enhancing VM Mobility with VxLAN, OVSDB and EVPN

Organizations are increasingly using virtual machine mobility to optimize server resources, ensure application performance and to aid in disaster avoidance. Typically VM live migration has relied on increasing the scale of the L2 broadcast domain to ensure that the VMs can be reached after migrations using their current addressing. This has resulted in the increasing use of VLANs and the need for L2 extension over the WAN.  As a result organizations are looking for ways overcome the limitations with VLAN scale and for methods to extend the L2 domain over the WAN that ensure the best performance. VxLAN has emerged as an alternative technology to VLANs, and EVPN has emerged at a better way to transport VMs over the WAN. Together these technologies can enable VM live migration over the WAN, or long distance vMotion in VMware parlance, but they need to all work together effectively and this is where OSVDB, VxLAN routing and a new technology from Juniper called ORE come in to play.

VxLAN Increases VLAN Scale
Organizations are increasingly looking to VxLAN as a solution. The primary goals behind this network architecture is to increase traditional VLAN limits from 4,094 and to enable VM mobility across Layer 3 subnets. VxLAN is a tunneling technology and is used to create an overlay network so that virtual machines can communicate with each other and to enable the migration of VMs both within a data center and between data centers. VxLAN enables multi-tenant networks at scale, as a component of these logical, software-based networks that can be created on-demand. VxLAN enables enterprises to leverage capacity wherever it’s available by supporting VM live migration. VxLAN implements a Layer 2 network isolation technology using MAC in IP encapsulation that uses a 24-bit segment identifier to scale beyond the 4K limitations of VLANs.

Optimizing EVPN for Virtual Machine Mobility over the WAN

Organizations need to insure that their applications are available and performing. Server virtualization helps by enabling virtual machine mobility.  If a server is overworked or will be unavailable vMotion can be used to migrate live workloads to another server in the current data center or in another data center. This requires that the addressing including the MAC, IP address and VLAN ID remain the same so that sessions are not dropped when the VM move happens. This is done by extending the L2 domain to the new location, know as Layer 2 stretch. Within a subnet this is easy to do. Across subnets in the data center it becomes more difficult. Doing live migration over the WAN introduces considerable challenges. Juniper has introduced a number of technologies to make virtual machine live migration possible.

The challenge with VM mobility is how to do the Layer 2 stretch in a way that ensures that the VM can be reached after it is moved. There are a number of issues that need to be dealt with. The MAC and IP address no longer pinned to a site or to an interface as they have moved with the VM. You need fast convergence of network paths as VM moves so that traffic will reach it quickly. You need ingress and egress traffic convergence and optimization to avoid having traffic go through the former default gateway after the VM has moved. You need learning of the effects of the live motion event and information distribution control so that the network isn’t impacted by signaling traffic. You need proper L2 & L3 interaction so that everything happens in a timely manner to ensure the best experience for the users of the applications that are affected by the VM move. VPLS has been the traditional methods of doing this, and now Juniper is supporting EVPN to provide enhancements to the solution.

Connecting Islands of Resources in an SDN Data Center

Application Agility is Critical
Organizations are rolling out new applications that they use to drive the business. These applications are virtualized. They are increasingly distributed, dynamic and they can span locations. They connect employees, customers and the supply chain. They make employees more productive, help customers to engage with the business and facilitate better inventory management. They also provide timely business intelligence.  This means revenue to the organization. Time to deploy is critical. Organizations need to be agile when it comes to deploying new applications.

The problem is that the network is an obstacle. Due to the complexity of configuring the network speed of deployment is an issue. There are so many things that need to be configured. You need to configure route mapping, port mapping, VLAN mapping, QOS, NAT, ACLs and the list goes on.  The networking side hasn’t changed since it was invented decades ago. It takes weeks to configure the network connections that are needed when you deploy an application.

Organizations have been using server virtualization for years to overcome the limitations of physical server virtualization. When you have to deploy a physical server it could take weeks from the time you first knew you needed it until it was up and running. Now provisioning virtual servers only takes minutes. With virtualized servers we realized agility and resilience and improved physical server utilization. We need the same type of benefits for the network. You can’t let the network get in the way when you need to move fast and gain the advantages of new applications. Organizations are looking for ways to provision the network work quickly.

Choosing the Right Switch is Critical to your Transformation Project

If your organization is going through a data center transformation project you are probably looking at your options for switching infrastructure. As you design your network to support the move to virtualized compute infrastructure and the roll out of new application deployments the choice of switching infrastructure becomes a critical decision. One of the most versatile switching platforms on the market is Juniper’s QFX Series 10GbE/40GbE devices.  I’ve had the opportunity to talk with many of our customers about the projects that they are using the QFX switches for and why they chose it over the other options in the market. I’d like to share these examples with you.

Many organizations are undergoing data center transformation projects such as moving to a virtualized data center, deploying large scale Enterprise applications, converging data and SAN networks, and undertaking big data analytics projects. They are looking for a versatile switching platform that they can deploy in any of these scenarios. The QFX switches are high-performance, low-latency, 1RU edge devices that are installed at the top-of-rack in the data center. They include rich Layer 2 and Layer 3 support and standards-based bridging, routing and FCoE capabilities. They can be deployed as standalone switches and then as the deployments increase in scale they can be converted to a QFabric node through a simple software upgrade. This makes them ideal for these types of projects.

Simplifying the Network is the Key to Improving Application Performance

In order ensure application performance and increase productivity across the organization while trying to keep budgets under control Enterprise organizations have been increasingly evaluating and implementing a series of new technologies for the past few years. These technologies hold out the promise of increasing the agility of new application rollouts that deliver game changing services, and meeting the needs of the organization to understand the business and make timely and well informed decisions as well as meeting the changing needs of the organization as they adapt to moves, consolidations and mergers.

The first one of these technologies is server virtualization which is now reaching the middle of the bell curve of the adoption cycle with more than half of organizations at the pervasive or fully virtualized stage according to IDG. The next is cloud computing where investments are up over last year, and the year before, with private cloud now as the preferred model over public cloud. Lowering TCO is a top selling point for both private & public cloud. Cloud solves challenges around business continuity and disaster recovery by providing resources on demand, often in a pay as you go model. It also becomes more popular as organizations begin to see it as an alternative to large capital expenditures for infrastructure.

Computer Networking Delivers Performace to Formula One Racing

Throughout Europe and the rest of the world the most recognizable name in motor racing is the Formula 1 Grand Prix. If you follow Formula 1 racing then you know that last weekend the teams came back from their summer break. Now they are at a turning point in their strategy. It’s time for the teams to decide where to focus their development efforts. Should they focus on winning points this year, or on designing a car that will win next year? With the rewriting of the rules for car design for 2014 this decision is especially difficult. You may be wondering what this means for Juniper and for networking. The answer is quite a lot. Juniper provides networking equipment to the Lotus F1 Team and their driver Kimi Raikkonen was 2nd in the driver’s championship running until last Sunday’s race in Belgium. Data analysis and computer aided design are keys to determining a winning strategy and to building a winning car.

Winning Requires Constant Improvement
Unfortunately in last Sunday's Belgian Grand Prix, a brake failure due to overheating forced Raikkonen out of a race for the first time in 39 Grands Prix and he dropped to 4th place in the standings. Another retirement will likely end his chances for a driver's championship this year. The team needs to analyze the data and discover ways to avoid any kind of failure for the rest of the season and they need to keep the car competitive with eight races to go. These F1 race cars are not static in design. The teams develop the car all though out the season. The pace of innovation can be daunting. The car can be up to 5% different each race according to the rules. Development is a tricky matter of resource allocation that is similar to high tech product development where a product’s life cycle could be shorter than its development cycle.

Dealing with Change in the Data Center - Getting to Network as a Service

We are continuing on a long transition from the physical data center to the virtual data center. Resources that were wholly physical are being virtualized. Resources that were static are now dynamic. This trend started with server virtualization and has expanded to network virtualization. With the move to virtualization you have made progress in gaining better utilization your physical resources. You are using fewer physical servers but they are larger and denser. There are more virtual machines and more network ports to connect them. This has created an exponential growth in the number of interactions that you must make on the network to get everything connected and communicating. The challenge is in the time it takes to get work done. Let’s look at some tools that Juniper provides to make your life easier.

Zero Touch Provisioning
Your first step is to get the equipment up and running. Juniper provides a zero touch provisioning tool that lets you do this using standard configurations for the switches and a DHCP server to assign an IP address and things like that. It’s used by the networking team. It handles routine tasks that are typically done once. With ZTP highly repetitive routing tasks that took hours can be reduced to minutes.