Gestating Ethernet standards are designed to ease VM switch management
Cisco and HP say their intentions are aligned when it comes to the hairy task of managing growing numbers of switched VMs in data centers. The companies have both submitted proposals to the IEEE on ways to manage the switch management of multiplying VMs moving around.
The IEEE 802.1Qbg and 802.1Qbh specifications are designed to offload significant amounts of policy, security and management processing from virtual switches on NICs and blade servers and put it back onto physical Ethernet switches. The IEEE amendments define a feature called Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregation (VEPA), allowing a physical end station to collaborate with an external switch to provide bridging support between multiple virtual end stations and virtual machines, and external networks.
VEPA also allows an external bridge – or switch – to perform inter-VM hairpin forwarding of frames, something standard 802.1Q bridges or switches are not designed to do.
VEPA was proposed by HP but it was limited in operational scope. So it was combined with Cisco’s VN-Tag proposal to support the ability to run multiple virtual switches and multiple VEPAs simultaneously on the end point. To do this, bg and bh include a multichannel function that attaches a tag to the frame to identify which VM the frame came in on; and a port extension capability that allows administrators to choose the switch they want to delegate policies, ACLs, filters, QoS and other parameters to VMs.
IEEE 802.1Qbg and bh would make management of the virtual data center environment easier for server and network administrators by requiring less elements to manage, and less instances of element characteristics – such as switch address tables, security and service attribute policies, and configurations – to keep track of.
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