Many customers are building private or public clouds. Intrinsic to cloud computing is having multiple tenants with numerous applications using the cloud infrastructure. Each of these tenants and applications needs to be logically isolated from each other, even at the networking level. For example, a three-tier application can have multiple virtual machines requiring logically isolated networks between the virtual machines.Traditional network isolation techniques such as IEEE 802.1Q VLAN provide 4096 LAN segments (via a 12-bit VLAN identifier) and may not provide enough segments for large cloud deployments. Cisco and a group of industry vendors are working together to address new requirements of scalable LAN segmentation as well as transporting virtual machines across a broader diameter.
The underlying technology, referred to as Virtual Extensible LAN (or VXLAN), defines a 24-bit LAN segment identifier to provide segmentation at cloud scale. In addition, VXLAN provides an architecture for customers to grow their cloud deployments with repeatable pods in different subnets. VXLAN can also enable virtual machines to be migrated between servers in different subnets. With Cisco Nexus® 1000V Series Switches supporting VXLAN, customers can quickly and confidently deploy their applications to the cloud.
Scalable Cloud Network with Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switches and VXLAN
