Cisco VXLAN ushers in cloud LAN era
September 1, 2011
Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO), one of many companies announcing new cloud-related efforts at VMworld in San Francisco this week. One of the company’s new projects was hailed as a "LAN for the clouds," a virtual LAN (VLAN) aimed at cloud computing environments and based on the Virtual Extensible LAN standard (VXLAN)…
VLAN technology has been around for many years, but now, we are starting to see VLAN principles applied to a larger environment. A VXLAN can support many millions more interfaces than a traditional VLAN, up to 16 million, according to Cisco comments in a Network Computing story. It can span public and private cloud networks, improving performance and reliability of cloud connections between data centers, essentially giving packets Layer 3 encapsulation over a Layer 2 network connection. The other option some companies have is to actually extend traditional VLANs over Layer 2 networks, but problems can arise with this solution.
Cisco was heavily involved in drafting the VXLAN standard, which still needs to be approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force, but has received support from VMware and many other companies.