http://wikibon.org/blog/vmware-network-os-announcement-at-vmworld-vfabric/
VMware Director of R&D Howie Xu will be presenting The Future Direction of Networking Virtualization at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco (9am Monday 8/30 and 4:30pm Wednesday 9/1) and Copenhagen. In a preview video, Howie states that “VMware will be announcing an open, extensible networking virtual chassis platform, a Network OS or networking hypervisor, so that anyone can develop the on-demand networking service on top of vSphere.” There will also be services built on top of the platform.
A recent VMware video suggests the company is about to jump into networking in a big way. Dubbed “vFabric,” This new offering would be a generic hypervisor for virtual network devices, from load balancers to security appliances, and would presumably be integrated with the existing vNetwork Distributed Switch functionality.
Most hypervisor products include an internal virtual network switch, but VMware’s ESX has multiple choices. The original “dumb” virtual Ethernet switch was augmented by vSwitch back in the ESX 3 days, bringing more-advanced configuration options.VMware improved and renamed the vSwitch in vSphere 4, creating the vNetwork Standard Switch (vSS). The introduction of vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) in vSphere 4 really set VMware’s network capabilities apart. Howie Xu released a video discussing his sessions at VMworld, beginning with a quick pan past Xu’s whiteboard, and including a discussion of the state of the art, vision, and product and technology roadmap for VMware’s networking-related efforts. Xu talks about creating a “networking virtual chassis or hypervisor” to allow third-parties to develop and roll-out advanced networking devices within vSphere. VMware has already steamrolled through the heart of server-based applications, making VMware-based virtual appliances as common an installation format as the DVD. Now the company is turning its attention to the network. Xu speaks of both a platform and a service to support this ”open extensible networking virtual chassis platform,” and goes on to suggest that it could be used by “networking security, load balance, application acceleration, IP address management, and performance management” products. The virtual appliance marketplace is already populated by the familiar names in networking, from F5 to Bluecoat to Checkpoint. Networkers have been conditioned with the belief that custom silicon is the best way to achieve low latency and high performance for network devices. The same could be said of the storage world, where companies like HDS, 3PAR, and BlueArc pride themselves on their custom ASICs. But EMC, HP, and others are proving that Intel’s server-class CPUs and peripheral busses now have the guts to go head-to-head with custom silicon. The networking world is no different, with many newer companies basing their products around industry-standard hardware. But deploying these systems in a virtual environment is more challenging. Can a virtual machine hypervisor prioritize threads for network devices? Can it handle the overhead related to networking operations in real-time? What happens in the event of a DDoS or network flood? Most network devices run real-time operating systems like VxWorks or QNX to ensure packet throughput, but virtual environments are notorious for “overflow” of I/O or CPU load between guest machines. The whiteboard provides some hints as to how VMware will tackle these issues. First, note the term, “latency-aware queueing,” which suggests that a mechanism will monitor the hypervisor and alter the queues for virtual network devices as the load changes. As latency rises, the hypervisor can move workloads to different processor cores or even alternate hardware using vMotion. We also spot a reference to “non-blocking”, suggesting an asynchronous I/O mechanism will reduce the likelihood that one of these virtual network devices will have to wait for data. Both of these technologies are hallmarks of real-time operating systems (RTOS), and are critical to the design of scalable hypervisors like VMware’s ESX. It is likely that the company is developing an advanced hypervisor environment for these specialized devices. If these assumptions are true, then this is a remarkable development. One could see an entirely new and more-powerful ecosystem evolve around VMware vSphere, running virtual network devices in a quasi-real-time environment. vFabric will not destroy the larger network device market, yet expect wide vendor support for the concept, especially those involved in lower-end and remote-office applications.
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