Frontpage 2 - Page 8 - Define The Cloud

Network Overlays: An Introduction

By Joe Onisick (@JoeOnisick) on December 13, 2012

While network overlays are not a new concept, they have come back into the limelight, thanks to drivers brought on by large-scale virtualization. Several standards have been proposed to enable virtual networks to be layered over a physical network infrastructure: VXLAN, NVGRE, and SST. While each proposed standard uses different encapsulation techniques to solve current […]

Why We Need Network Abstraction

By Joe Onisick (@JoeOnisick) on November 27, 2012

The move to highly virtualized data centers and cloud models is straining the network. While traditional data center networks were not designed to support the dynamic nature of today's workloads, the fact is, the emergence of highly virtualized environments is merely exposing issues that have always existed within network constructs. VLANs, VRFs, subnets, routing, security, […]

Data Center Overlays 101

By Joe Onisick (@JoeOnisick) on November 24, 2012

I've been playing around with Show Me (www.showme.com) as a tool to add some white boarding to the blog. Hereâ€™s my first crack at it covering Data Center Network overlays. Related posts: What Network Virtualization Isn’t Choosing The Right Private Cloud Storage The Data Center Network OS – Cisco Open NXOS The App on the […]

NVGRE

By Joe Onisick (@JoeOnisick) on November 19, 2012

The most viable competitor to VXLAN is NVGRE which was proposed by Microsoft, Intel, HP and Dell. It is another encapsulation technique intended to allow virtual network overlays across the physical network. Both techniques also remove the scalability issues with VLANs which are bound at a max of 4096. NVGRE uses Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) […]

Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT)

By Joe Onisick (@JoeOnisick) on November 15, 2012

STT is another tunneling protocol along the lines of the VXLAN and NVGRE proposals. As with both of those the intent of STT is to provide a network overlay, or virtual network running on top of a physical network. STT was proposed by Nicira and is therefore not surprisingly written from a software centric view […]

VXLAN Deep Dive – Part II

By Joe Onisick (@JoeOnisick) on November 13, 2012

In part one of this post I covered the basic theory of operations and functionality of VXLAN (http://www.definethecloud.net/vxlan-deep-dive.) This post will dive deeper into how VXLAN operates on the network. Letâ€™s start with the basic concept that VXLAN is an encapsulation technique. Basically the Ethernet frame sent by a VXLAN connected device is encapsulated in […]

« Previous 1 … 6 7 8 9 10 … 29 Next »