Geneve:generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation

Earlier this year, VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat and Intel published a IETF draft on Generic Network virtualization Encapsul ation (Geneve). This draft (first published on Valentine's Day no less) includes authors from the each of the first generation Encapsulati On Protocols-vxlan, NVGRE, and STT. However, beyond the obvious appeal of unification across hypervisor platforms, the salient feature of Geneve is that it WA s designed from the ground up to be flexible. Nobody wants an endless cycle of new encapsulation formats as network virtualization designs and controllers mature, Certa Inly not the vendors, the ever growing list of acronyms and RFCs.

Of course press releases, standards bodies and predictions about the future mean little without actual implementations, Which is why it's important to consider the ' ecosystem ' from the beginning of the process. This includes software and silicon implementations in both commercial and open source varieties. This all takes time but since Geneve is designed to accommodate a wide variety of the use cases it have seen a relatively q Uick uptake. Unsurprisingly, the first implementations that landed were open source software-including switches such as open VSwitch and networking troubleshooting tools like Wireshark. Today The first hardware implementation have arrived, in the form of the the All-Gbps intel xl710 nic, previously know N as Fortville.

Why are hardware support important? Performance. Everyone likes flexibility, of course, but most of the time that comes with a cost. In the case of a NIC, hardware acceleration enables us to having our cake and eat it too by offloading expensive operations While retaining software control in the CPU. These NICs add encapsulation awareness for classic operations like checksum and TCP segmentation offload to bring Geneve t Unnels to performance parity with traditional traffic. For good measure, they also add in support for a few additional geneve-specific features as well.

Of course, this is just the beginning-it was still only six months after publication of the Geneve specification and much More are still to come. Expect to see further announcements coming soon for both NICs and switch silicon and of course new software to take Advanta GE of the advanced capabilities. Until then, a discussion session as well as a live demo would be in Intel Developer Forum this week to provide a first Glim PSE of Geneve in action.

Transfer from http://networkheresy.com/2014/09/08/geneve-ecosystem-support-has-arrived/

Geneve:generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation