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…
Tag: Network virtualization
Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT)
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…
VXLAN Deep Dive – Part II
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. Let’s start with the basic concept that VXLAN is an encapsulation technique. Basically the Ethernet frame sent by a VXLAN…
VXLAN Deep Dive
I’ve been spending my free time digging into network virtualization and network overlays. This is part 1 of a 2 part series, part 2 can be found here: http://www.definethecloud.net/vxlan-deep-divepart-2. By far the most popular virtualization technique in the data center is VXLAN. This has as much to do with Cisco…
Access Layer Network Virtualization: VN-Tag and VEPA
One of the highlights of my trip to lovely San Francisco for VMworld was getting to join Scott Lowe and Brad Hedlund for an off the cuff whiteboard session. I use the term join loosely because I contributed nothing other than a set of ears. We discussed a few things,…
Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a protocol standard ratified in June of 2009. FCoE provides the tools for encapsulation of Fibre Channel (FC) in 10 Gigabit Ethernet frames. The purpose of FCoE is to allow consolidation of low-latency, high performance FC networks onto 10GE infrastructures. This allows for a…