Improving Network Scalability and Workload Mobility with VXLAN

Virtualization, cloud, mobile, and other digital technologies have sparked immense innovation over the past decade, but they’ve also increased data center complexity. Organizations must connect multiple geographically distributed network segments and cloud instances in order to support thousands of different applications, virtual machines (VMs), and workloads. This has made network management far more complex than it ought to be, most IT executives say.

Seventy-five percent of executives responding to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers poll say rising complexity is creating intolerable risk. Respondents said the top consequences of data center complexity include financial losses due to security events, inability to respond to market opportunities, and lack of operational resilience.

Many organizations are turning to a network virtualization technology known as Virtual extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) to battle complexity. In many cases, VXLANs make it easier to extend existing network capabilities with highly scalable virtual networks. Best of all, VXLANs don’t require significant investments to replace or modify the existing network infrastructure.

Easy Access

One of the key ways VXLAN reduces complexity is by enabling greater workload mobility. Organizations with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments often find that moving applications or services among different on-premises and cloud environments are more difficult than they anticipated.

Workloads in the cloud typically comprise an application, its associated data, a VM, and all other processes and resources which support a connection between a user and the app. Moving a workload from one environment to another without any code modifications can be a challenge. Cloud-based apps won’t work properly if any part of the workload is missing or compromised.

Network engineers have traditionally used virtual LANs (VLANs) to improve workload accessibility and scalability. Operating at Layer 2 of the OSI model, VLANs separate the physical network into multiple logical networks. This is a popular approach because it allows an administrator to segment networks based on users, devices, or job functions without regard for the physical location of the user or device.

Enhanced Scalability

Moving a workload within the same VLAN is a fairly straightforward process, but there are limitations. Under the IEEE 802.1Q standard, all VLANs must have a 12-bit identifier. This naming convention limits networks to a total of 4,096 network IDs at any given time. That was more than enough for years but is insufficient for organizations with multi-cloud environments.

The VXLAN protocol overcomes this limitation with a 24-bit identifier, which means 16 million VXLANs can coexist on the same physical network. That’s more than enough to handle large cloud networks that include many VMs.

Because it creates an overlay network, VXLAN further supports extreme scalability and workload mobility by allowing host devices in different Layer 2 logical networks to route traffic across an underlying Layer 3 network. It simply adds VXLAN headers to Layer 2 Ethernet frames and places them inside User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets for transport. With this capacity, workloads can be allocated dynamically between servers in separate domains.

By resolving VLAN’s limited address space and enabling better utilization of network paths, VXLAN makes it easier for organizations to scale their network environments while logically isolating workloads. Give us a call to learn more about achieving the benefits of VXLAN in your data center.