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IEEE Ethernet Specs Could Soothe Data Center Ills
alphadogg writes "Cisco, HP and others are waging an epic battle to gain more control of the data center, but at the same time they are joining forces to push through new Ethernet standards that could greatly ease management of those increasingly virtualized IT nerve centers. The IEEE 802.1Qbg and 802.1Qbh specifications are designed to address serious management issues raised by the explosion of virtual machines in data centers that traditionally have been the purview of physical servers and switches. In a nutshell, the emerging standards would offload significant amounts of policy, security and management processing from virtual switches on network interface cards (NIC) and blade servers and put it back onto physical Ethernet switches connecting storage and compute resources. 'There needed to be a way to communicate between the hypervisor and the network,' says Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Systems Group. 'When you start thinking about the complexities associated with running dozens of VMs on a physical server the sophistication of data center switching has to be there.'"
Aye. I'm not a networking fellow myself, but when I went to the vSphere launch, my co-worker expressed serious interest in the 1000V portion of vSphere 4.
The hardest part about evaluating VMWare in our datacenter at the time was definitely teaching myself enough about networking to ensure that the ESX Servers' network configs were correct to implement the scenarios we wanted to test. Being able to basically follow a standard setup procedure for the server infrastructure and then pass off an IP or a management console to a Cisco guy and know that it's in good hands... that's a godsend.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
But 5000 FreeBSD instances with Xen? Surely you'd want a shared kernel solution for that many instances. If we assume that a minimal FreeBSD kernel can run in 2MB, that's 10GB just for the kernels before you hit user space. Unless Xen does memory deduplication, of course.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Honestly, this entire thing is giving the wrong answer to the wrong question.
Creating huge layer 2 networks and relying on elaborate management systems to try to keep your cloud system running is insane.
I'm currently admining a system with several hundred servers, and a few thousand clients. Each of the servers is on it's own layer 3 network. There is some up front overhead, but ongoing operations of the entire thing, from a network point of view, is a breeze.
DR is built in. It's the ultimate in flexibility. Feel like outsourcing an application? Move the network and VM to the outsourcer, and change the routing, done. Nothing changes from the app or users standpoint. The network becomes virtual with the servers and the applications. I have some servers that have multiple networks assigned to them (run multiple apps).
Layer 2 is evil. STP is evil. VTP is the devil. Don't do evil. Virtualize the network with your servers. Do layer 3.
moo