In this post, Bruce Davie and T. Sridhar of VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit take a look at a proposed a new encapsulation protocol that would standardize how traffic is tunneled over the physical infrastructure by network overlay software.

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For as long as we’ve been doing Network Virtualization, there has been debate about how best to encapsulate the data. As we pointed out in an earlier post, it’s entirely reasonable for multiple encapsulations (e.g. VXLAN and STT) to co-exist in a single network. With the recent publication of “Geneve”, a new proposed encapsulation co-authored by VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat and Intel, we thought it would be helpful to clarify a few points regarding encapsulation for network virtualization. First, with all the investment made by us and our partners in developing support for VXLAN (described here), we very much intend to continue supporting VXLAN — indeed, we’ll be enhancing our VXLAN capabilities. Second, we want to explain why we believe Geneve is a necessary and useful addition to the network virtualization landscape.

Read the rest of Bruce’s blog on the Office of the CTO blog here.