Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

Today I am extremely excited to announce VMware’s acquisition of Nicira, a 5-year-old company that has pioneered software-defined networking (SDN) and is the leader in networking virtualization for heterogeneous infrastructure environments and clouds.  When combined with the outstanding networking team and technologies already at VMware, I believe we have the same opportunity to do for networking what we’ve already done for servers and many other parts of the datacenter. In fact, the people, passions, ecosystem, and industry-transforming opportunity reminds me very much of the early days of VMware’s server virtualization efforts!  

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Let’s step back and fit this acquisition into context of VMware’s broader vision and product offerings.

Delivering the Software-Defined Datacenter

In a recent blog, I discussed the notion of a software-defined datacenter, the foundation of cloud computing. Cloud computing is about agile, elastic, efficient, and reliable services, and it can only be achieved through intelligent software that abstracts out hardware resources, pools it into aggregate capacity, enabling automation to safely and efficiently dole it out as needed by applications.

Tenants or customers utilizing the software-defined datacenter can have their own virtual datacenter with an isolated collection of all the compute, storage, networking, and security resources that they are used to. Furthermore, this virtual datacenter can grow and shrink to efficiently utilize physical resources. But most importantly, the time to deploy these resources can be orders of magnitude faster than in most of today’s IT environments. This is what the software-defined datacenter is all about, and it is the architecture for the cloud. This acquisition advances our software-defined datacenter strategy.

For the past 14 years, VMware has led the way towards the software-defined datacenter with our battle-tested server virtualization capabilities, as well as through vSphere’s software-based storage and availability offerings. Nicira will help us advance our software-defined networking activities substantially. Today we offer VMware vSphere’s virtual switching,  vCloud Director Networking, vShield Network and Security services, and collaborate with the industry on the VXLAN protocol. This acquisition expands VMware’s networking portfolio to provide a full suite of SDN capabilities and a comprehensive solution lineup for virtualizing the network – from virtual switching to virtualized layer 3-7 services.

Some Challenges with Networking in the Cloud

Cloud computing has put a real strain on traditional approaches to networking. Managing networks and networking services in a cloud environment is complex and time-consuming: to provision and configure the networking services for workloads in the cloud, customers often have to deal with creating and managing thousands of VLANs and VLAN rules. As a result, while provisioning a VM may take only 2 min, provisioning the associated network and networking services can add days or even weeks to the process. Furthermore, cloud computing benefits from applications’ ability to move all around a datacenter (or even across datacenters). However, physical network topology limits workload mobility within the scope of a top-of-the-rack switch and a handful of servers.  The industry clearly recognizes the need and opportunity to transform networking for the cloud, and thus to enable even more agility and efficiency in its operation.

Enter Software-Defined Networking

To address these challenges, Nicira’s software-defined networking starts by virtualizing the network, decoupling the logical view of a network from its physical implementation. It does so by creating an abstraction layer between server hosts and existing networking gear which decouples and isolates virtual networks for specific networking hardware, turning it into a pool of network capacity. This enables the on-demand, programmatic creation of tens of thousands of isolated virtual networks with the simplicity and operational ease of creating and managing virtual machines. The resulting business value comes from more agile, efficient, flexible, and robust networking configurations. You can more about network virtualization here, and the included picture should look familiar:

Embracing Multiple Hypervisors and Multiple Clouds

Customers want networking solutions that work across their entire datacenter, managing communication of both VMware- and non-VMware installations as well as (gasp!) physical hardware. Nicira is the pioneer in software-defined networking, but it is important to note that they are also the leader in network virtualization for heterogeneous hypervisor and cloud environments. They are major contributors to the networking capabilities of other hypervisors (via the Open vSwitch community) as well as to the “Quantum Project”, one of the key subsystems of OpenStack.

I can imagine skepticism as to whether we will continue this substantial embrace of non-VMware hypervisors and clouds. Let me be clear in this blog… we are absolutely committed to maintaining Nicira’s openness and bringing additional value and choices to the OpenStack, CloudStack, and other cloud-related communities. It’s worth noting that this builds upon the openness delivered by our other recent acquisition of DynamicOps, a leader in cloud automation solutions for heterogeneous environments. It also builds upon our experience with the SpringSource community as well as our stewardship of the CloudFoundry Open Platform as a Service Project.

Similarly, Nicira’s network virtualization supports a broad variety of NICs, switches, appliances, networking APIs, and fabric types. A customer’s ability to gain new networking virtualization capabilities without changing out their existing infrastructure is paramount. This is an area VMware is very comfortable with today through our broad partnerships and hardware compatibility programs around servers and storage. We will continue to maintain our open approach and provide access to our networking technology and APIs to our partners to allow them to add new value through both hardware and software advancements, as well as by providing compatibility with legacy systems. In this context we look forward to continuing to work closely with current and future ecosystem partners such as Cisco.

We’ll be sharing even more exciting news about how we plan to engage and support these different communities in the near future. In the meantime, you can visit the blog of Nicira co-founder and CTO Martin Casado here.

Looking Forward

In closing, this is an incredibly exciting time at VMware, but also for our collective industry. Customers clearly demand cloud computing, and we can deliver it via the software-defined datacenter. With this acquisition, we bring together two pioneering teams in network virtualization to accelerate the realization of the software-defined datacenter and the benefits it will deliver to businesses and service providers alike.

I’ll close now with a shameless plug to join us at VMworld where we’ll speak even more about VMware, Nicira, and the exciting times ahead!

Posted by Ramin Sayar
Vice President &
General Manager,
Cloud Infrastructure
& Management

Today, VMware announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire DynamicOps, Inc. (read VMware press release, read DynamicOps’ blog post). Headquartered in Burlington, MA, DynamicOps is a leader in the emerging market for cloud automation solutions that enable provisioning and management of IT services across heterogeneous environments.

I am personally thrilled about the acquisition and let me explain the reasons behind my excitement.

While VMware in the past has been primarily focused on helping customers realize the benefits of virtualization, our mission has progressively expanded. Today, we are dedicated to helping our customers in their journey to the cloud.

Our role in this journey until now has been to help our customers build and deliver Infrastructure as a Service offerings in their datacenters, often referred to as the private cloud. To this end we have significantly expanded our product portfolio with offerings such as: VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite which provides integrated health, capacity and configuration management of a cloud infrastructure; VMware vShield which provides secure multi-tenancy and isolation; and VMware vCloud Director which aggregates virtualized storage, server and network resources to create virtual datacenters (VDCs) that can be automatically instantiated, elastically scaled and consumed on demand. The foundation, of course, is VMware vSphere, used in over 80% of virtualization deployments and together we are able to provide the most comprehensive solution for an enterprise-class private cloud. This innovative cloud infrastructure and management solution has been rapidly adopted by well over a thousand customers and the majority of leading service providers to enable common management, compliance and security for the enterprise hybrid cloud in a very short time.

Cloud computing has brought a new responsibility for IT. Instead of being solely a builder of services, IT now has to be a broker of services and infrastructure capacity sourced either internally or rented from multiple external resources – vCloud partners as well as other IaaS providers like AWS. I often hear from a variety of customers that “Our developers are using AWS for its application platform capabilities, but we would like to use and manage other external clouds as well. However, there is no way for us to impose uniform governance, control, access and self-service over heterogeneous cloud services.”

This is obviously a critical and emerging requirement for customers, which is why Gartner refers to it as a ‘Service Governor.’ DynamicOps solves this challenge for IT. The combination of our current product portfolio and DynamicOps helps our customers with both aspects of their cloud journey – by providing a complete infrastructure stack to build a cloud as well as a comprehensive management solution that addresses the consumption of cloud resources in a uniform way.

A number of customers have told me that, while they have and will continue to standardize on vSphere for their production datacenters, they have a few pockets of other hypervisors for various reasons, and they are looking for a multi-hypervisor management solution. DynamicOps’s unique model-driven architecture enables our vSphere and infrastructure admins to easily model IT infrastructure services so that the same policy, governance, self-service management capabilities we provide for vSphere can be extended to other hypervisors, physical hardware and other cloud resources.

For customers that have built clouds using VMware vCloud Director, DynamicOps will provide a policy automation and integration layer that enables IT to not only map users and applications to the right virtual datacenters, but also delivers the ability to integrate the provisioning process into IT’s existing investments such as provisioning and orchestration tools, service desks and CMDBs in order to provide a single cloud storefront across heterogeneous infrastructure pools. DynamicOps’s powerful capabilities can be extended to model and deliver application services as well. For instance, with DynamicOps IT can deliver higher-level services such as Platform-as-a-Service, Database-as-a-Service, and Storage-as-a-Service in the same uniform way as delivering core compute services on demand.

DynamicOps is also very synergistic with a set of cross-cloud solutions that VMware has brought to market recently. For example, vFabric Application Director, released in February, is a cloud-enabled application provisioning solution that simplifies how developers and application architects create and standardize application deployments across diverse cloud services. DynamicOps will be integrated with Application Director to provide policy and governance for where and how such applications should be deployed.

Finally, our roadmap for DynamicOps will include integration with our IT Business Management (ITBM) solution. ITBM provides a business lens to IT activities including costs and service levels associated with different infrastructure pools and providers. The combination of ITBM and DynamicOps will provide CIOs with an even higher level of governance and control and further accelerate the benefits of cloud computing.

In summary, customers are looking to VMware as their trusted advisor and solutions provider to help them build and manage agile, cost-effective hybrid clouds. We don’t take this responsibility lightly. While this acquisition further strengthens VMware’s position as the infrastructure and management platform of choice for cloud computing, it’s another big step for VMware and our customers on the journey to cloud computing and ITaaS, one we’re delighted to be able to announce today.

Posted by Jerry Chen
Vice President, Cloud
and Application Services

In 2009, VMware acquired SpringSource because we saw a fundamental change in the way our customers were building and running their applications.  More than ever, our customers were using technology to build new applications to improve their business, respond to competition, and get closer to their customers. These new applications were built for mobile, used social networks and leveraged enormous volumes of real-time data to make better decisions.  The underlying frameworks and technologies powering these applications needed to be lightweight and cloud-ready so they could be developed, deployed, and scaled out in rapid succession. 

Part of this broader shift in application infrastructure was the move to cloud and application deployment on virtual infrastructure. Traditional application servers simply weren’t designed, optimized or licensed for this new world. These legacy systems are too cumbersome, too costly, and definitely not cloud-ready. We saw the need for a new breed of application infrastructure to support this new world of applications.   

The VMware vFabric product family seeks to address the complexity and cost of traditional Java platforms by providing a simple, lightweight development and runtime optimized for VMware cloud infrastructure.  

Today we continue to advance our vision with the introduction of vFabric Suite 5.1 and vFabric SQLFire Enterprise Edition. The new suite includes vFabric Application Director to automate the deployment and management of vFabric applications on VMware cloud infrastructure. SQLFire Enterprise Edition is an in-memory distributed SQL database that will enable application data to meet cloud scale and performance needs. VMware vFabric Suite 5.1 will provide the core application services required to build, run and manage Java Spring applications whether on-premise or in the cloud.

As enterprises move to the cloud, they are choosing vFabric to effectively build and architect new cloud-ready applications. With vFabric, our customers are increasing the reliability, availability and scalability of applications and enhancing application portability between their private clouds and VMware-enabled public clouds. They are also improving application performance through advanced management, monitoring and optimization.

At VMware, we believe the cloud is changing enterprise IT, and we are excited about the opportunities this transformation will open up for our customers.  We believe the vFabric Suite represents the best platform for building and running modern applications on VMware cloud infrastructure.

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

It has been nine months since we launched Cloud Foundry^TM - the industry’s first open platform as a service (aka PaaS).  Cloud Foundry debuted with both the CloudFoundry.com service and as an open source project via CloudFoundry.org and we have seen a rich ecosystem of technology providers and service providers emerge around Cloud Foundry.  Offering a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services, Cloud Foundry, currently available in beta, makes it faster and easier to build, deploy and scale applications.

We have made great progress delivering a choice of frameworks and application services to developers and now want to highlight the choice of both public and private clouds Cloud Foundry provides today. 

Multi-Cloud – “Write Once, Cloud Anywhere”

As PaaS gains momentum, there will be more choices of cloud destinations. Some developers might want to keep the entire development and deployment within their organization’s firewall; others may want to build internally and deploy via a hosted service, or vice versa.

As you make choices about cloud technology, one critical factor is whether you have a choice of clouds from which to deploy your applications. Ultimately, what many software developers want is an open PaaS environment with a choice of public, private and hybrid clouds for deployment.

When you build and deploy applications using Cloud Foundry’s open architecture and open source availability you don’t have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.

Why Multi-Cloud flexibility is so important?

• Managing your growth and changing needs over time – whether you want to run on private clouds or public clouds changes over time.  Having the flexibility to add capacity or migrate to another cloud without re-writing your applications it is critical for long term success.
• Protecting against vendor lock-in – you don’t want to be locked into a single cloud provider. Having the option to move between providers that suit your pricing needs or can offer better quality of service is critical.
• Meet different compliance and geographical needs – you want to be able to pick and choose where you want to deploy your applications based on compliance requirements, data protection laws, latency constraints and more.
• Accommodate peak loads – the ability to leverage a choice of public and private clouds to deal with “cloudbursting” scenarios enables you to have the ability to optimize spending.

Cloud Foundry – Making Multi-Cloud a Reality Today

The Cloud Foundry ecosystem is growing quickly with increasing number of technology partners working with us to expand the choice of public cloud providers, private cloud distributions and cloud infrastructures. These partners, combined with simplicity and openness of the Cloud Foundry technology, make the vision of Multi-Cloud a practical reality. 

With Cloud Foundry, moving your application to another cloud is very simple. Simply “target” your new cloud and “push” your application.  No code or configuration changes required.

Looking at the Cloud Foundry command line tool (“vmc”) it looks something like

vmc target api.mynewcloud.com
vmc push myapp

The Cloud Foundry team has a blog post that further describes how Cloud Foundry’s open architecture and tools enables a quick deployment of complex applications across multiple private and public destinations. 

The blog includes a demo showcasing live deployment to five different cloud destinations running Cloud Foundry today without a single code or configuration change to the application.

2012 – The Year of PaaS While Avoiding “Cloud Lock-in”

As many suggest 2012 will be the “year of PaaS”, a critical factor for success is the ability to deploy your PaaS-based application across a choice clouds, developer frameworks and application services. With Cloud Foundry, you don’t have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.

For more information on Cloud Foundry please visit http://www.CloudFoundry.com

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

The past few months have been very exciting at VMware. In July, we launched vSphere 5 and the industry's first cloud infrastructure suite. At VMworld in August, we unveiled our vision and products to liberate and support end-users in the Post-PC era. And today during the opening keynote of VMworld Europe (where we have more than 7000 registered attendees!) we are adding to the fun. We are announcing three new product suites that deliver a new approach to IT management – an approach that is specifically targeted at the “cloud era.”

As Paul Maritz pointed out in his August VMworld keynote, we’re now in a world where more than 50% of the total server workloads worldwide are virtualized. Amazing! Virtualization is really an on-ramp to cloud computing, enabling more and more enterprises to enter the cloud era. This has profound implications, impacting every facet of the IT landscape. For example, by separating applications from the hardware they run on, virtualization enables consolidation and mobility. However, many existing management tools and processes weren’t designed with this in mind. The cloud also requires changes to how IT is delivered, evolving to a model of instant, self-service access to elastic capacity. And finally, the cloud introduces a new dimension of choice (the enterprise datacenter is no longer the single source) that is changing the role of the CIO from IT provider to service broker.  I like to call this the “builder to broker” transition.

All of these changes are very powerful, and they have profound impact in terms of what it means to manage IT.  It’s time for an IT management rethink, and we believe that a new approach represents the next important step in the journey to the cloud. Done properly, this new approach should help enterprises move even more of their applications into the cloud and amplify the value they get from them being there. We feel this is so critical that we now have the majority of our engineers focused on developing management-related innovations across all of our product lines.

So, what is unique about VMware’s approach to management?  First, we believe the platform needs to shoulder much more of the management burden, embedding and automating as many capabilities as it can. This has been a guiding principle for many of the innovations in VMware vSphere – vMotion, DRS, HA and FT – and we will continue our quest to move this forward. We’re also constantly looking at manual interactions with vSphere and trying to get rid of as many as possible. We want to automate everything in sight as this is the only way customers will be able to achieve the efficiency and economics of cloud computing. 

Next, we believe the days of managing silos – of machines, of application stacks and of discrete disciplines – are over.  It is time to converge these disciplines, streamline and remove steps to create more agile, shared processes. This phenomenon is well recognized in the application delivery space as “DevOps”. We think there’s also key convergence in a new discipline of “CloudOps”.

Finally, cloud management must support high-velocity, dynamic environments.  The pace and scale of today’s IT demands require teams have visibility and control, but more importantly, they need the ability to focus on what really matters.  There’s simply too much data out there. We are focused on how to best filter this information, bringing the key facts to the appropriate team’s attention. This applies at all levels, from the server and storage administrators to the CIO and CFO.

The new product suites we are introducing today apply these foundational principles to simplify how customers manage infrastructure, applications and the business of IT in the cloud world:

• We first introduced the vCenter Operations Management Suite in March 2011, and we have had overwhelmingly positive response from our customers. Paul often talks about how VMware is out to “make infrastructure disappear,” and vCenter Operations helps deliver this. Its advanced analytics “learn” normal behavior in order to drive high levels of automation. The enhancements we are announcing today continue to converge performance, capacity and configuration management, and will support cloud-scale operations, or “CloudOps”.   

• The next area undergoing change in the cloud world is application management.  The changes to infrastructure brought about by virtualization about are forcing fundamental changes in how enterprises build, deploy and manage the next generation of applications.  These previously siloed functions are increasingly converging, and new processes like “DevOps” are emerging.   The new vFabric Application Management Suite will help unite development and operations, simplifying and automating the way customers deploy, monitor and optimize their applications across clouds.  

• As I mentioned earlier, cloud is causing the role of the CIO to evolve from builder to broker. The third suite of products we’re announcing today is aimed at supporting this evolution.  With so many choices – public clouds, private clouds, SaaS, traditional datacenters – now, more than ever, CIOs need the right information to make informed decisions about how to deliver services to the business.  The VMware IT Business Management Suite will converge the disciplines of IT finance management, service level management and vendor governance to give the CIO comprehensive visibility over cost and risk.  

These new management suites have been under development for multiple years now, and our entire company is thrilled to launch them today. If we can crack the code on how to operate and manage IT in the cloud era, we will open the door to a new world of amazing achievements. And while it’s not quite the “World Peace” I alluded to in the keynote, IT as a Service will be pretty good, too.

If you want to learn more about the suites we are introducing today, you can dive deeper at: http://www.vmware.com/go/management-experience

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

Each year there is one event I look forward to more than any other – VMworld.  VMworld brings together the leading industry innovators to share virtualization and cloud best practices, showcase breakthrough new technologies, get hands-on in the Labs, and catch up with old friends.  This week in Las Vegas we're hosting the biggest VMworld to date, with more than 19,000 virtualization and cloud geeks gathered to push the industry forward together (I remember being shocked to see 800 people attend just a few years ago!).  

The volume of news from the show is staggering.  You can read some truly impressive announcements across the board here and replays of the General Session keynotes, including VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s vision for the industry and my own technology-preview session, can be viewed here.   

I can’t possibly do justice to all of the amazing innovations, incredible customer stories, and just plain cool stuff going on at the show, but I did want to take a moment and highlight a few of my favorite moments so far:

Major Enterprises Pushing Ahead With the Cloud:  with just about every IT vendor guilty of pushing their marketing collateral with cloud terminology, it’s no wonder there’s healthy skepticism in the market.  So it was fantastic to see leading global brands talking about how they are gaining competitive advantage today with their virtualization and cloud deployments.

• Founded in 1932, Revlon is one of the world’s leading beauty brands, doing business in more than 100 countries on 6 continents. Leveraging vSphere and other VMware cloud technologies they’ve been able to take more than $70 million in cost out of their infrastructure, achieve a 300% increase in project throughput, and have virtualized 98% of all workloads globally (they literally have only 2 Unix servers left in their entire global footprint!). This has enabled Revlon IT to be much more responsive to the needs of the business, align projects more quickly to revenue opportunities, and be a true competitive advantage for the company. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZxZz1m8KKQ]
• The New York Stock Exchange is not only one of the world’s leading capital markets operators, they are also delivering specialized cloud services to the financial community. The low-latency, high-frequency environment places extreme demands on their virtualized infrastructure but they continue to push the envelope with VMware’s cloud infrastructure technologies. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyYwo6AZ7_I]

• We all know Southwest Airlines for their low fares and great customer service. But as the largest domestic carrier in the US, more than 85% of their revenue is driven through the web. vFabric technologies underpin much of southwest.com and by leveraging vSphere infrastructure on the back-end, Southwest has gone from 0-40% virtualized in less than 18 months and seen a reduction in time to deliver production servers from 6 days to one hour.  [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnHobD1eBG8]

Liberating IT and End-Users from Legacy Silos:  as we enter the post-PC era we all know the pressures the consumer world is placing on enterprise IT.  Employees expect their experience to be equal to their home life and they expect it “to just work” on whatever device they choose.  And if it doesn’t….well, they’ll take things into their own hands creating a security, management, and compliance nightmare.

Now this is easy to talk about but very, very difficult to crack. At VMworld we demonstrated a complete solution that gives IT a fighting chance — helping customers bring forward legacy Windows environments with the full-featured View 5.0 delivering updates to our Horizon Application Management platform, enabling both a secure corporate and personal persona on users’ mobile devices with Horizon Mobile, and advancing universal application and data delivery with Project AppBlast and Project Octopus. VMware’s vision seeks to free employees and enterprise IT from more than two decades of complex, device-centric computing, and delivers a more user-centric, IT-as-a-service experience. I’m using most of these new products internally via our “dogfood” program and am loving it. (Some trivia: Our own Paul Maritz is attributed as being the first to run “dogfood” programs in software companies!)

The World’s Leading Cloud Infrastructure Platform: as Paul Maritz pointed out in his keynote, we’re now in a world where more than 50% of the total workloads worldwide are virtualized – we have definitively entered the Cloud Era and VMware is dedicated to accelerating and amplifying our customers’ resulting benefits.  Our product teams take tremendous pride in extending the lead of our technologies and it was a thrill to show off the results of more than 1 million engineering hours. We’re raising the bar yet again on what customers can expect in terms of performance, availability, and security for their core cloud infrastructure and even tackling the next datacenter frontier with VXLAN, taking on networking the way we’ve taken on storage and compute (stay tuned for more in this space). And as one attendee told me, “it’s about automation, automation, automation.” We’re continuing to drive management and automation innovation for an even more application-aware, automated infrastructure. And the message should be quite clear that our mission is to get customers to this new world, but in an evolutionary way. We’re constantly looking at a technology rollout that helps our customers bridge from their existing infrastructure environments to this brave new world of the cloud.

It’s been an amazing first few days here in Las Vegas and I want to say thank you to all of the employees, partners, customers, students, VMUGgers, “Labbers,” and technologists with a passion to move the industry forward.  Without your desire to invent the next-generation of IT none of us would be here to celebrate these amazing innovations.  Every year I am humbled and awed by the creative conversations in the hallway, the sci-fi-like demos on the exhibit floor from companies both new and old, and the enthusiasm and energy from folks who have traveled from across the world.  It’s truly a privilege and I can’t wait to share what’s in store in our VMworld Europe event this Fall and next year as we return to San Francisco!

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

VMworld 2011 is well-underway with more than 19,000 attendees gathered in Las Vegas to learn about, celebrate, and drive the future of both virtualization and cloud computing. The amount of news has been staggering, but I want to take more time to focus on one particularly important announcement in this blog; a new vision and approach for networking in the cloud era.

Cloud computing holds the promise of accessing shared resources in a secure, scalable, and self-service manner, and these core tenets place huge demands on today’s physical network infrastructure.  While compute and storage are virtualized, network is still a physical impediment to full workload mobility and can inhibit multi-tenancy and scalability goals. Even with VLAN technologies, the network continues to restrict workloads to the underlying physical network and to non-scalable, hard-to-automate constructs.

Have we seen this before?

I like to think about this problem as similar to one we’ve previously seen in the telephony industry. One of the fundamental challenges with today’s networking is that we use an IP address for two unrelated purposes, as an identity AND as a location. Tying these together restricts a (virtual) machine from moving around as easily as we would like. We had the same challenge with telephony before wireless came of age… our phone number rang for us at a specific destination rather than following us wherever we went!

Just as our mobile phone numbers allow us to take calls virtually anywhere, separation of a machine’s network ID from its physical location enables more mobility and efficiency for applications. And this is exactly what we’re after in the cloud… a model that enables the efficient and fluid movement of virtual resources across shared cloud infrastructures both within and across datacenters. This improved mobility will ultimately enable better approaches to load balancing, disaster recovery, power-usage optimization, datacenter provisioning and migration, and other challenges approaching us in the cloud era.

Welcome VXLAN!

VMware has collaborated with Cisco and other industry leaders to develop an innovative solution to these challenges called “VXLAN” (Virtual eXtensible LAN). VXLAN enables multi-tenant networks at scale, and it is the first step towards logical, software-based networks that can be created on-demand, enabling enterprises to leverage capacity wherever it’s available. How does it work?

Using “MAC-in-UDP” encapsulation, VXLAN provides a Layer 2 abstraction to virtual machines (VMs), independent of where they are located.  It completely untethers the VMs from physical networks by allowing VMs to communicate with each other using a transparent overlay scheme over physical networks that could span Layer 3 boundaries.  Since VMs are completely unaware of the physical networks constraints and only see the virtual layer 2-adjacency, the fundamental properties of virtualization such as mobility and portability are extended across traditional network boundaries. Furthermore, logical networks can be easily separated from one another, simplifying the implementation of true multi-tenancy.

And VXLAN enables better programmability by providing a single interface to authoritatively program the logical network. Operationally, it will provide the needed control and visibility to the network admin while allowing the flexibility of elastic compute for the cloud admin.

And VXLAN can be implemented to be very efficient and resource savvy. We take advantage of efficient multicast protocols for the VM’s broadcast and multicast needs. We leverage Equal-Cost Multi-path (ECMP) in the core networks for efficient load sharing. And within the virtualized environment we leverage vSphere’s DVS, vSwitch, and network IO controls to ensure the VMs get the bandwidth and security that they require. Cisco will certainly leverage the N1000V switch as one key place for VXLAN implementation, and other partners will soon announce their approach as well.

A Collaboration

VMware has collaborated closely with Cisco and industry leaders including Arista, Broadcom, Brocade, Emulex, and Intel in making this an industry-wide effort and to ensure a seamless experience across virtual and physical infrastructure. As part of this effort, we have published an informational IETF draft (see http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan-00.txt) to detail the use case and the technology. To achieve its full potential, VXLAN must be adopted across the industry, and we’re committed to helping this happen in an open and standards-compliant way.

In Closing… 

VXLAN is the flagship in a growing set of capabilities that deliver a new model of networking for the cloud. For some additional context, be sure to check out Allwyn’s blog on logical networks from May. It addresses the physical limitations associated with today’s networking infrastructures in an evolutionary way, and offers a model that enables the efficient and fluid movement of virtual resources across cloud infrastructures. And what’s more, it does so in an evolutionary way that leverages today’s network infrastructure investments. Stay tuned for even more updates on this exciting new development!