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Thursday, 17 October 2013

Introduction to Network Virtualisation with NSX

Thomas Kraus
Eric Lopez

Straw poll of audience asking what type of cloud infrastructure is in place.  No VCD users in the room, but a few using OpenStack.

Service providers (internal or external) want to:
- deploy applications at scale with little pre-planning
- have mobility to move workloads across geographies and providers
- flexibility to create and add L3 - L7 services

Currently VMs are linked to physical network features such as ACLs, IP addresses, VLANs etc.  This means it is slow to make changes, placement of workloads is limited, there are hardware dependencies, operationally intensive and therefore expensive.

Treat NSX as though it is a network hypervisor equivalent to ESX - it places an abstraction layer between VMs and the physical network switches underneath.  Brings hardware independence, allows VMs to be moved around without changing the underlying physical host network config and brings the operational benefits of virtualisation.

In and NSX network every host server only has 1 IP and 1 MAC address per server.

The NSX controller planer is an HA cluster on x86 servers and is out of the data path.  Controls "thousands" of devices - but this was not quantified.

The NSX data plane is based on software switching in the host servers - vSwitch for VMware (NVS) and Open vSwitch for CloudStack and OpenStack (OVS).  Every host in the NSX environment needs a vSwitch of the correct flavour and works with vSphere, KVM and XenServer hypervisors.

NSX manager is a vAppliance

Physical servers are connected through an host running Open vSwitch NSX Gateway

NSX is a tunnelling overlay using STT, GRE and VXLAN.  It effectively adds another layer of L2 headers to each packet.  Jumbo frames are required.

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