Understanding VXLAN Virtual-Physical-Cloud L2/L3 Networks

VMware has announced VXLAN, the Virtual Distributed Layer-2 Network IETF draft standard, of which Arista is a co-author. VXLAN is a special encapsulation mechanism that runs between virtual switches and enables virtual machines to be deployed and moved on or between any server within the network. The main benefits to the IT department in planning to support VXLAN is the ability to deploy a virtual machine on any server within the network, regardless of its IP subnet. This enables the IT department to create a scalable network architecture that supports capacity on demand and workload mobility regardless of geography and IP addressing. VXLAN requires no changes to the underlying IP addressing architecture and should require no major changes to installed infrastructure in the data center.

What is VXLAN?

Virtual eXtensible LAN is a new network encapsulation and segmentation mechanism that enables a VM to be deployed on any server, regardless of the IP subnet the physical ESX host is in. It accomplishes this by encapsulating the MAC and IP packets from the virtual NIC with a UDP header and then using IP multicast to emulate a broadcast domain. To get traffic in and out of this encapsulated 'virtual wire' the non-encapsulated traffic must go through a vShield Edge virtual machine acting as a VXLAN gateway. Performing these elegant L3-transparent migrations with L2-only storage transport technologies like FCoE is impossible.

http://www.aristanetworks.com/media/system/pdf/TechBulletins/VXLAN_Overview.pdf

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