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.'"

Comments

This is a big deal for cloud hosts.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a huge deal for cloud hosts. We aren't a cloud provider, but we do offer similar services on our corporate network. We're using Xen to run over 5000 FreeBSD instances on a singe high-end server. When you're dealing with this many instances, all under constant use, the networking overhead becomes huge.

At first we were using Linux, but it just couldn't offer the throughput that we need. We aren't in a position to acquire more hardware (which is, of course, why we are using virtualization so extensively), so we had to find a better software solution. We found that FreeBSD was compatible with our applications, but had a much more efficient network stack.

Re:This is a big deal for cloud hosts.

[amorsen]

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.

Re:This is a big deal for cloud hosts.

[Sir_Lewk]

And getting yourself into one of those scenarios is most likely "doing it wrong" as well.

Sounds like....

[FooAtWFU]

Sounds like Cisco wants to sell you more expensive equipment.

Who knows? It might be worth the six-figure price tag. :)

Re:Sounds like....

[Wesley Felter]

That's exactly what it is. If hypervisors got too smart you might be able to use cheaper switches, and the networking industry just can't have that. VEPA is designed to cripple hypervisors, ensuring that you'll have to keep buying enterprisey switches.

Cisco

[nighty5]

Cisco / VMware has done some work in this space, abeit it is a Cisco / VMware solution.... The Nexus 1000V basically provides an overlay to the virtual networking stack from VMware and places it into an appliance with a Cisco CLI. It can then be hooked into the usual Cisco management suspects. The solution makes sense because it also gives back control of the network aspects back to netops, instead of the server ops/virtual ops... http://www.vmware.com/products/cisco-nexus-1000V/

Re:Cisco

[RulerOf]

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.

howto secure virtual machines

[Euzechius]

When using virtual machines you loose some control and visibility compared to the tradition pizza box server. A physical server is easy to pinpoint, easy to implement ACLs (ethernet/ip), Quality of Service, traffic monitoring or just to shut down a network port. :) Both VEPA and VN-link are technologies that allow you to better seperate different virtual machines on the same physical box.

For VMware, Cisco developed a virtual switch ( YES, a downloadable switch! :) that integrates with VMware ESX 4 that offers all this network security, monitoring goodness. This virtual switch is called the Nexus 1000v and can be downloaded at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9902/index.html ( 60-day trial ).

About a year ago the ethernet specifications for data centers already got an extension called FCoE or Fibre Channel over Ethernet ( http://www.t11.org/fcoe ). Basically this allow you to use one ethernet network for both your lan and your storage san. And thus not needing to build out a seperate Fibre Channel SAN.

Re:Reasons for lack of HTTPS

[jolyonr]

buggeration!

At least it was posted securely

Wrong Question, Wrong Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

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