ProActive Routing in Scalable Data Centers with PARIS
Report ID: TR-953-13Author: Arora, Dushyant
Date: 2013-06-00
Pages: 38
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Abstract:
Modern data centers must meet many challenges and expectations: (a) They must scale to a large number of servers, while off ering high bisection bandwidth and flexible placement of virtual machines. (b) They must allow tenants to specify network policies and realize them by forwarding traffic through the desired sequences of middleboxes. (c) They must allow tenants to bring their own IP address space to the cloud to ease transition of enterprise applications and middlebox confi guration. The traditional approach of connecting layer-two pods through a layer-three core constrains VM placement. More recent "flat" designs are more flexible but have scalability limitations due to flooding/broadcasting or querying directories of VM locations. Rather than reactively learn VM locations, our PARIS architecture has a controller that pre-positions IP forwarding entries in the switches. Switches within a pod have complete information about the VMs beneath them, while each core switch maintains complete forwarding state for part of the address space. PARIS o ffers network designers the flexibility to choose a topology that meets their latency and bandwidth requirements. PARIS also allows tenants to bring their own IP address space and utilizes lightweight virtualization using Linux namespaces to o er middlebox service in a manner that truly reflects the pay-as-you go model of cloud computing. It utilizes MPLS label forwarding and aggregation in the network core and uses source routing at the network edge to realize middlebox policies specifi ed by tenants. Finally, we evaluate our PARIS prototype built using Open ow-compliant switches and NOX controller. Using PARIS we can build a data center network that can support up to 500K VMs.