CLOUD NETWORKING WITH ARISTA

B e s t o f B r e e d V i r t u a l i z a t i o n S o l u t i o n s

VXLAN: Eliminating Cloud Boundaries with SDN

1

Arista, in partnership with EMC® Isilon®, F5 Networks and VMware, demonstrate SDN technology innovations to support multi-vendor programmatic automation between their respective systems. This capability enables end-to-end network virtualization from physical, to virtual, to cloud networks. Arista and VMware are co-authors of a new standard in virtual networking, called Virtual eXtensible LAN (VXLAN), that has created a common network foundation that enables seamless interoperability across diverse topologies. Utilizing VXLAN in combination with API interaction between ecosystem partners and Arista’s Extensible Operating System (EOS), VMware, Arista, F5 and Isilon are demonstrating a fully automated, software defined Data Center environment. Dynamic Capacity Bursting Traditional network technologies have limited the resource pools to only the servers within a layer 2 VLAN or a specific layer 3 subnet. The increasing proliferation of the number of end devices, such as mobile devices and Virtual Machines (VMs), in these pools have mandated that these pools be expanded or augmented with newer resource pools. In addition, enterprises increasingly require virtual machine or application capacity bursts for unanticipated events. Designing an Information Technology (IT) team able to deliver such an elastic network is not only complex but also time consuming. VXLAN enables seamless application deployment regardless of physical location or IP subnet and therefore can be used to support application spikes even when physical resources are scarce. By eliminating physical locality and sub-netting restrictions, the IP network within a data center is rendered extremely fluid and agile in topology, enabling the placement of an application on any server at any time. The Demonstrated Solution Arista EOS leverages VMware's vSphere API, gathering real time information about VXLAN network segments being created within VMware and concurrently configures the physical network to support VM mobility across vSphere domains. Arista brings VXLAN gateway capabilities to hardware, bridging the non-virtualized and non-VXLAN enabled hosts with the VXLAN network. By providing wire rate VXLAN tunnelling technology within hardware, Arista switches can

VXLAN A new network technology developed by Arista and VMware that enables stateful VM mobility, within the data center beyond L3 boundaries. This increases the agility of applications and enables workloads to be deployed to better meet the business needs.

WHY By overcoming the need of flat, layer 2 networks, enterprises and service providers are able to take advantage of more scalable, proven layer 3 technologies within their Data Center without sacrificing crucial application mobility.

CLOUD NETWORKING WITH ARISTA

2

be used to branch VXLAN enabled networks with traditional VLAN networks. This revolutionizes the scope and capabilities of the cloud network without requiring forklift upgrades or re-architecting current networks or applications. F5 Networks BIG IP Virtual Edition monitors and detects application load and notifies VMware vCenter Server for additional resources when applications become overloaded. The F5 appliance is also responsible for load balancing traffic within the network to give better performance and utilization of networking resources. Using F5’s open iControl API, Arista data center switches can query the application deployment topology through BIG-IP, and obtain an application-centric view of the infrastructure. This allows Arista’s Advanced Event Manager (AEM) to dynamically reconfigure the network based on network administration requirements or specific network events. The use of these open APIs to automatically notify and respond to events is at the core of SDN and multi-tenant clouds. VMware’s vShield Manager (VSM) supports VXLAN’s Virtual Tunnel End Point (VTEP) to provide the VXLAN encapsulation and decapsulation functionalities that remain invisible to the virtual machine.

3

EMC Isilon Scale-out NAS, leveraging Arista hardware Virtual Tunnel End points, is used to provide highly efficient, simple to manage scale-out storage to VMware virtual machines as they move across virtual, physical and cloud networks. These pieces come together to form a solution for a fully automated software defined cloud network. This demonstration illustrates the trend towards programmable open and interoperable APIs with real time automation that is the hallmark of software defined networks. Now, with the solutions from Arista, VMware, EMC Isilon and F5, service providers, enterprises, and cloud operators have a degree of choice and freedom that enables new capabilities and best of breed “cloud-stack” services that have never been possible in monolithic single-vendor architectures.