Using VXLAN (Virtual Overlay LAN) to Speed & Secure Your Clouds
April 22, 2013
Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Ariel Shuper.
The immense growth of IaaS cloud computing has given rise to a need for highly scalable and secure virtual networks, without requiring significant investment in replacing or adding to the existing infrastructure. One virtual overlay technology that has emerged to address this is VXLAN, which uses MAC-in-UDP tunneling to capitalize on the best aspects of existing layer 2 infrastructure and the advantages of layer 3 transport. However, while VXLAN seems an ideal solution, this article points out performance challenges that arise with its usage, which must be addressed for its benefits to be fully realized.
Background: The Need for Virtualized Overlay Networks
Over the past few years, cloud computing has grown at a tremendous rate, with worldwide spending on IT cloud services tripling since 2008 and expected to reach over $100 billion in 2014.1 More specifically, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market, having grown over 45% in 2012 alone…
IaaS allows multiple tenants to share system resources and infrastructure, which improves hardware utilization, thereby reducing the cost of the IT infrastructure, both at implementation and ongoing. Cloud computing also provides a measure of agility that simplifies the IT management process, provides additional control over proprietary data, and improves the end-user experience…
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