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.

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.

Inter Data Center Workload Mobility with VMware

Server virtualization has increasing become implemented in the data center because it enables higher utilization of physical servers increasing their value to the organization. By abstracting the server operating system from the server hardware, virtualization allows physical resources to be shared among many virtual machines. The capabilities of cloning, suspending, and migrating live VMs among a cluster of physical hosts enhances resiliency and performance of applications. Advancements in networking technology allow servers within a single cluster to be located across the entire data center, or in another data center some distance away, further enhancing application availability, but making this technology work isn’t simple.

The Case for Live Migration
There are may use cases put forward for live workload migration and they are covered in the document, and were also covered in my previous blog “Making the Case for Long Distance Virtual Machine Mobility.” These use cases include optimizing server resource utilization, optimizing resource consumption at various locations, hybrid cloud where overflow workloads move to another data center, and disaster avoidance were workloads are moved to saftey, as well as a follow the sun model where workloads move according to the time zone of users. Some scenarios for data center migration for live workloads can be accomplished without implementing complicated first-hop-responder and route-optimization techniques. Other scenarios are possible however, they require implementing protocols that share state and fate, thereby increasing the complexity and reducing the reliability of the connected data centers. As a result of these considerations the network is a critical factor.

Juniper’s Internet Edge Implementation Guide is Here

Juniper has created an implementation guide that will help network designers create a simplified Internet edge solution using Juniper Networks MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers, SRX Series Secure Services Gateways, and EX Series Ethernet Switches. This guide details specific design considerations, best practices, and Juniper tools that can be used to build the optimal solution. It concludes with a real-world deployment example that illustrates the solution and recommended configurations in detail.

The Role of the Internet Edge
The Internet edge acts as the enterprise’s gateway to the Internet. It provides connectivity to the Internet for data center, campus, and branch offices, and it connects remote workers, customers, and partners to enterprise resources. It can also be used to provide backup connectivity to the WAN for branch offices, in case the primary connection to the enterprise WAN fails.

Today’ s Internet edge must enable access to a variety of applications such as cloud computing solutions, mission critical applications, and bandwidth hungry applications such as video. The Internet edge must also scale seamlessly to support growing application performance and bandwidth needs, while supporting a rich set of routing and security features. This guide will help you reach this goal.

Making the Case for Long Distance Virtual Machine Mobility

With VMWorld coming up I’m reminded of a top of mind subject, virtual machine mobility. The reason for moving virtual machines is to better allocate server resources and maintain application performance. It’s a useful technology that works great in the data center. We also hear a lot about the need to move virtual machines across the WAN, live, without losing sessions. This is known as Long Distance vMotion or generically as long distance live migration. This might sound like a good idea, but it gets a bit complicated when you think outside the data center walls and across the WAN. It creates complexity in the network, as maintaining sessions requires keeping the same IP address and MAC address after the move.  There are many proposed use cases for it, but is it such a good idea?

Limitations of Live Migration
Long distance live migration over the WAN has limitations due to latency and bandwidth requirements and the complexity of extending layer 2 which is required to maintain the same MAC address. Issues include the potential for traffic coming first to the original data center where the gateway is, and then looping to the new data center where the VM has moved.  Traffic can also loop back over the WAN to reach the storage that stayed behind. There are also bandwidth requirements to handle the large scale movement, as well as issues with storage pooling and storage replication as well as the complexity of implementing the L2 bridging architecture. If we are going to deal with all of this complexity of moving virtual machines over the WAN there had better be a good reason to do it. But is there? Here is a look at the various use cases for long live migration that I have found.

Juniper's Campus Validated Design Guide

In my previous blog (link) I wrote about the New Network Platform Architecture and how Juniper is delivering network designs that will enable our customers to optimize their network investments. With these designs Juniper’s goal is to help customers overcome technology limitations so that they can deliver greater efficiency, and increased business value, by leveraging their networks more effectively. To this end Juniper has released the Juniper Networks Horizontal Campus Validated Design Guide.

A Step-by-Step Process
This guide provides a simple, step-by-step process that businesses can use to rapidly deploy a small campus network solution. The deployment in this guide is based on a tested reference topology designed by Juniper that can easily be scaled and adapted to specific customer requirements. This guide is for network administrators who are tasked with designing and deploying a small campus network for a small enterprise who want to complement their understanding of networks, with specific guidelines and configurations from Juniper.

Juniper Networks offers this validated design guide for the campus and branch domain to help customers start building and configuring their own networks. A validated design represents a specific configuration of Juniper Networks hardware and software platforms that has been tested together and represents a reliable foundation on which to base a customized network for a business.

Optimizing Windows 7 Desktop Delivery over WAN using Cisco WAAS

As the migration to Windows 7 as the desktop operating system picks up, IT organizations are looking at hosting desktops in the data center using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as the desktop delivery method. We are finding that this is especially popular in the finance, healthcare, and federal verticals where security and compliance makes VDI an attractive choice. Moreover, IT managers in other vertical industries are interested in this technology as a flexible option to serve their employees while assisting with their desktop management goals.

One of the ongoing dilemmas for IT continues to be ensuring a good user experience for any new method used for delivering applications to end users. Many users are in remote branch offices, campus locations, or are mobile; as a result these users are separated from the data center by the Wide Area Network (WAN). Limited bandwidth (per user) on the WAN pipes, high WAN latencies, packet loss, and more often a combination of all three, impacts the user experience significantly. This is where the Cisco WAN optimization solution (Cisco WAAS) can assist IT with delivering a rich Windows 7 user experience to remote users while reducing the need for bandwidth upgrades.

If one looks at the usage profile, users are typically using productivity applications (eg: email, web, document preparation, presentations, etc), and accessing corporate videos for training as well as printing documents. These users are accustomed to getting a rich experience using applications locally on their Windows 7 desktops. The goal of the Cisco WAAS solution is to maintain this rich experience when the desktop moves to the data center, and is delivered using a VDI delivery protocol such as Microsoft RDP over the WAN.

Cisco WAAS Delivers Breakthrough Innovations as a part of the Cisco Data Center 3.0 Initiative

Software as a service and cloud computing offer greater IT flexibility and potential cost savings but place more of a burden on the WAN, as the applications are more distributed. This impacts application performance and creates a challenge for IT organizations that are focused on providing a good user experience and improving end user productivity. This situation not only impacts users in the branch offices, but also the growing number of mobile workers and home workers.

As WAN & application optimization vendors evolve their products to solve these issues, Cisco WAAS stands out through its systems approach to enabling cloud offerings and tight integration with the network and the data center infrastructure. Cisco WAAS accelerates applications and data over the WAN, optimizes bandwidth, empowers cloud computing, and provides local hosting of branch IT services, all with industry-leading network integration.

On June 30, at Cisco Live! the release of Cisco WAAS 4.2 will be announced as a key component of our Data Center 3.0 launch delivering key innovations in the areas of service agility with on-demand deployment, higher efficiency with cloud-optimized applications and IT cost reduction with expanded Microsoft Windows application hosting and greater resiliency with in-line clustering. Visit the WAAS team at the Cisco Data Center booth to learn about the latest WAAS features and see the demos and get your questions answered.

How do You Consolidate Data When You Manufacture at Locations around the Globe?

This is the question that VF Corporation was faced with. They are a global leader in branded lifestyle apparel with more than 30 brands, including Wrangler, The North Face, Lee, Vans, and Nautica. They sell through retailers in 150 countries and their workforce is distributed across 770 global offices. To reduce IT costs they were consolidating branch office servers and applications in centralized data centers, but this created a challenge with transferring large CAD image files.

VF Corp used a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) application for apparel design that was hosted on servers in the branch office. The IT department wanted to deploy a new application in the data center to reduce the costs of maintaining it and give them better control over data. The designers use this application all day every day and need access to the large CAD image files that it creates, so this move presented a challenge to the WAN over which these files would have to travel.

“When we tested the new application during development, downloading images over the WAN took an average of 2 to 3 minutes, and up to 5 minutes,” says Billy Yawn, the network architect, for VF Corporation. “Before deploying the application to branch offices, we needed a WAN acceleration solution.”

Meeting the Challenge of Scaling Application Performance for the Global Organization

Many organizations are using server virtualization to consolidate application workloads in their datacenter. By using a highly efficient platform like Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) organizations find that they can improve asset utilization, and dramatically lower IT costs. This enables the datacenter team to be more responsive to initiatives that produce real value for the business.

The server platform and virtualization address one part of the application delivery challenge for the global Enterprise. UCS can easily handle the compute requirements of complex applications, but what about the increased demand placed on the WAN as applications are delivered to a distributed workforce? How do you ensure an acceptable user experience? Accessing information over a WAN is much slower than accessing information over a LAN, due to limited WAN bandwidth, packet loss, and latency. To meet this challenge a solution needs to both scale the server platform and increase WAN performance.

Applications not only need to run fast in the datacenter; applications must run successfully for the end users wherever they may be. Organizations are finding that they must consider application acceleration as a part of their application solution architecture so that that they not only scale application performance on the server, but also delivery applications to reach remote sites with high performance to serve the users at every location.

Can Managed Service Providers Help the Enterprise Meet their Application Performance Goals?

The success of today’s enterprise relies on the performance of applications over the WAN. The use of bandwidth-intensive, web-based applications (such as videoconferencing and collaborative applications) that are utilized over the WAN creates a challenge for network managers who need to ensure application performance while dealing with limited resources. Application Performance Management (APM) requires monitoring tools and the expertise to use them. The question is how you ensure that you are properly optimizing your applications without having to invest in additional resources.

The answer to this situation could be to rely on your Managed Service Provider (MSP) to deliver an application performance management service. Outsourcing the management of the enterprise WAN could ease both your management burden and reduce IT costs while providing a way to ensure application performance. Many MSPs are meeting their customer’s needs to increase services while holding down costs by providing managed network, data center, and application services. However, to capitalize on these opportunities, managed service providers must overcome a number of challenges themselves.

MSPs are looking for ways to increase the value that they deliver to enterprise customers as traditional services become commonplace. Enterprise customers want more than a simple WAN pipe. They are looking for service level agreements for their critical applications and they want application performance assurance regardless of the connection type or the geographic location. At the same time both the Enterprise and the Managed Service Provider need to achieve a reasonable ROI on their IT investments.

How Do You Extend WAN Optimization to Reach 30,000 Mobile Users?

Let’s say you are an IT manager and you are tasked with extending WAN optimization out to your small office and mobile workers and you have upwards of 30,000 users to serve. You might be looking at Cisco WAAS Mobile, a software-based WAN Optimization solution that provides application acceleration capabilities for PCs and decreases application response times by 3 to 30 times by mitigating latency and increasing link throughput.

Typically a deployment supporting 30,000 users would require several servers to host the mobile gateway, but it is likely that your mandate is to keep down the costs of the solution. A server that can scale to the required level and that offers the flexibility to use virtualization would make the best platform. Using virtualization is an ideal scenario for WAAS Mobile as it can be remotely installed on a virtual machine and remotely managed.

Our customers have told us that they have both scaling requirements and budget constraints, so we looked for the right solution to meet these needs. The answer is to deploy WAAS Mobile on the Cisco Unified Computing System UCS C-Series platforms, which are powerful, virtualization-optimized computing platforms that can host resource-intensive networking applications such as Cisco WAAS Mobile, providing scalability and deployment flexibility.

What is the Biggest Intangible Benefit of WAN optimization?

WAN optimization technologies have many benefits, some easily measured and others that are intangible. The latter might be more important to the organization. Many customers tell us that they realize both tangible and intangible benefits from deploying Cisco WAAS. Tangible benefits include reduced or avoided bandwidth costs, reductions in branch office servers and a reduced branch office equipment footprint. These cost savings are realized since Cisco WAAS eliminates duplicate data transmission, enables branch office server consolidation and integrates with the Cisco ISR router. These tangible benefits can be fairly easy to measure as we shall see. Intangible benefits can be more difficult to measure, but they can often be more compelling. Let’s look at an example of a customer who has experienced both types of benefits.

Recently a customer told us that they expect to save $400,000 per year by deploying Cisco WAAS. Brisbane Australia based mining and heavy equipment supplier Hastings Deering says they achieved a rapid ROI with their WAN optimization project that connects their data center and remote office locations. The Hastings Deering Group sells and supports Caterpillar heavy equipment used in the mining and construction industries across Queensland, the Northern Territory and the South Pacific region, including Papua New Guinea. With a network of 65 nodes connecting to corporate applications in Brisbane, CIO John Birch says there was a constant battle to keep branch response times low for all its applications. “About 18 months ago we decided to take a look at network options other than just increasing bandwidth and we started exploring WAN optimization products”

Cable & Wireless: APM Managed Services Differentiation

Organizations are changing how they use the network to access applications and managed service providers are changing their network services to meet the challenge. As they centralize applications and access them across the WAN organizations need a network that delivers their applications with high performance and they need to see how their applications are performing. Managed service providers are meeting customer’s requirements by moving away from offering standard low feature WAN links and creating new innovative application performance management (APM) services that accelerate applications and provide customers with real-time information on the results that are being delivered.

In this video Steve Horwath, Product Manager at Cable & Wireless, talks with Stephen Makayi, Marketing Manager at Cisco, about the growing demand for application performance and the Cable & Wireless managed WAN optimization service, which provides customers with optimized application performance with advanced reporting, which in turn give customers information they can use to drive their business. Steve discusses how APM enables managed service providers to deliver an application-aware network with uptime guarantees for applications that changes the conversation MSPs can have with customers, from selling plain WAN links to providing application performance assurances, and putting the MSP in the role of a trusted advisor.

Fuji Television Uses Cisco WAAS to Accelerate their Vancouver Olympics Coverage

The Olympics give us a chance to marvel at and enjoy the performances of athletes who demonstrate their intense dedication to the pursuit of excellence and their determination in the face of fierce competition. The games are a worldwide event and with audiences in the home countries anxious to see their athletes’ performances national television stations also have a challenge that they must meet. Fuji TV of Japan is no exception. With a long history of Japanese participation in the winter Olympics and a large home audience to serve, they have set up shop in Vancouver. Making this trip can be a costly undertaking and given the distance back to Japan they needed help in keeping communications smooth and keeping costs down.

To communicate with the home office Fuji TV set up a dedicated line between the company’s data center in Odaiba, Japan and the Olympic Media Village in Vancouver, a distance of over 7500 km. This connection provides Intranet access enabling the on-site staff, including production and news employees, to access the head office file servers and use its systems. This long distance WAN access allows Fuji TV to avoid having to transport and install data and application servers at Vancouver and thus avoid the cost of additional on site staff to maintain these servers. By reducing staff the costs savings is considerable, including air travel, housing, transportation and food.

Forrester Acknowledges Cisco as a Leader among WAN Optimization Vendors

In their Q4 2009 WAVE report Forrester recognized Cisco WAAS as a market leader in WAN optimization in their comparison of the top 8 vendors, considering criteria such as the offering, strategy, market presence, and technology.

Forrester says that WAN optimization is increasing in importance to IT organizations and that business issues such as consolidating branch office servers and rolling out new collaborative applications are driving its adoption. This is because companies rely on the WAN for delivery of their business-critical services, but the WAN suffers from poor performance because of latency over distance.

Forrester advises that WAN optimization technology plays a critical role in improving application performance by using techniques such as caching, protocol optimization, compression, traffic management and quality of service (QoS), to increase effective throughput and mitigate latency, while providing visibility into the traffic mix.

Optimizing Delivery of Applications from the Cloud

The adoption of cloud-based computing promises to improve the agility, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of IT operations required to provision, scale, and deliver applications to the enterprise. As with other technology trends, delivering applications from the cloud, to remote sites, creates challenges with application performance, availability, and security.

Enterprise IT departments are continuing to invest in technologies that generate cost savings while making their business applications more agile and available. These initiatives, such as consolidation of branch-office servers and virtualization of data center servers, are increasingly being adopted by the enterprise; however, they have not been without consequences. For example, branch-office server consolidation projects, while reducing the server footprint, can result in a poor end-user experience and increased bandwidth utilization because applications traverse a WAN link with higher latency and packet loss and lower bandwidth than they traverse a LAN link. WAN optimization solutions, such as Cisco® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), are implemented to deliver LAN-like application response times for end users and to defer a WAN bandwidth upgrade.

Optimizing your Hosted Virtual Desktop Delivery Architecture

Delivery of hosted virtualized desktops is seeing increasing up take by organizations that want to reduce the cost of deployment and management of end user systems. While desktop virtualization offers many advantages, there are benefits to be gained in performance, scaling and security that can be addressed by choosing the right hosting platform and networking components. By optimizing the network architecture organizations can host and deliver the highest number of view images and users sessions while keeping down the total cost of ownership.

For example by hosting virtual desktop images on the Cisco Unified Computing System organizations can greatly increase the number of images per server while reducing complexity, by taking advantage of capabilities such as memory capacity, virtualized adaptors, Unified Fabric and centralized management that is integrated with solutions from VMware.

By using Cisco ACE to provide server load-balancing services organizations can greatly increase the number of user sessions per server, while increasing system security, by taking advantage of SSL off load and TCP reuse capabilities and built in intelligent security functionality, and they can realize cost reduction through virtualization capabilities and integration with provisioning systems from VMware.

Are You Getting Top Performance for Your Oracle Applications over the WAN?

After attending Oracle Openworld in October I've been thinking about performance issues with Oracle applications over the wide area network (WAN). With the changing business environment IT organizations are re-architecting how they deploy enterprise applications. Oracle applications automate business processes and increase productivity, but in this new network-centric world their performance is being impacted by longer WAN links and inefficient Internet protocols resulting in reduced performance and decreased user productivity.

Globalization and outsourcing has created a workforce that is spread across the world. At the same time, to reduce IT costs resulting from the spread of regional systems, and to take advantage of large scale virtualized systems, organizations are centralizing their application and IT infrastructure in the data center. The result of this trend is that the distance from the end user to the application server has increased dramatically and the connection is often over links with limited bandwidth.