So two solutions that help Paul as a service administrator include VMware, NSX and Nuage Networks,
VSP, product or virtual services platform.
I'm going to demonstrate the VSP in a moment.
Now, these products may not apply to your environment.
It depends on how big it is and what features are required.
But let's explain why these products came to the rescue of Paul so that he no longer had to deal with
Grumpy Peter the network guy.
So think of Voice and how WhatsApp changed the way Voice works.
So Paul has two ESXi servers.
He's asked PETA, the network guy, to give him a connection from one iSCSI server to the other.
Now PETA has told him that he needs to use a Layer three infrastructure.
And Paul just says, that's fine.
Go ahead with your layer three infrastructure.
Another problem Paul has with Peter is that when he wants to implement policies like access control
lists, it takes Peter a long time to make those changes.
So when Peter wants to allow, let's say one to talk to VMT but not talk to the M3, it takes Peter
a long time to implement those changes.
He wants to do it through the CLP and he needs to make changes on multiple devices and he only wants
to do it during a change window.
So all of that just adds more to the frustration that Paul is encountering.
Paul tells Peter, All I need is IP connectivity from this server to that server.
Don't worry about implementing access control lists for my VMs.
From a quality of service point of view.
I will mark DHCP as I want.
Just implement the quality of service for the DHCP marketing that I send you.
Don't worry about acls only implement the acls to allow esxi one to talk to esx ie two.
I'll take care of the rest.
Pete is getting quite nervous because suddenly the amount of work that Paul was asking him to do has
been reduced dramatically.
All Pete is doing is providing connectivity from this iSCSI server to that ESX server.
In other words, he's just implementing basic routing, basic switching.
No fancy intelligence has been added to the network.
Because Paul is now putting the intelligence in the end devices rather than in the network.
The network becomes a transport mechanism to move traffic from A to B, but has no intelligence in the
same way that the Internet has no intelligence with regards to the cold setup and cold down of Skype
or WhatsApp.
So what about VLANs and how does traffic get sent from VM one to VM?
Now there's a bunch of new terminology that you need to learn, and as always, new terms need to be
invented.
So we sound intelligent.
So these ESXi servers are what are called Vee tips or virtual tunnel endpoints.
They are just the endpoint of a tunnel.
The iSCSI service can dynamically set up tunnels between them using what's called VXLAN or Virtual Extensible
LAN.
Think of it as a tunnel similar to JIRA or IPsec.
It's just a tunnel mechanism.
And we'll talk in more detail about VXLAN later.
One of the advantages that VXLAN has is that it supports 6 million segments or layer two domains or
VLANs.
To use a networking term.
We don't necessarily talk about a VLAN per se, but think of it as a layer two network.
But we can support 16 million of them.
No longer is pool restricted to 4000 odd VLANs, so Paul can put his VMs into whichever subnet he wants
to and to take it a step further.
Paul can dynamically allocate the subnets.
So he might say that this VM is going to be in the 172610 network and VM two is going to be in the 172
16 2.0 network.
Is Peter's underlay network aware of that?
And the answer is no.
Traffic sent from VM one to VM two is going to be sent through the VXLAN tunnel.
So the underlay network consisting in this example of router one router tune router three have no visibility
of these subnets because they are encapsulated within VXLAN.
The rot is in the core.
Only sea traffic from the ships.
So SSI one sending traffic to SSI two.
They have no visibility of the overlay network.
So what is Paul done here?
Paul has created what's called a virtual network or an overlay network that's running on top of the
underlay network.
So this is the underlay network.
The VXLAN is the overlay network or the virtual network.
And the advantage of the virtual network or overlay network is that it can be dynamically created and
torn down as required.
I'm going to demonstrate this in a moment, but the whole idea is what are the advantages from Paul's
point of view?
Number one, he can have 16 million VLANs.
He can put his VMs into individual VLANs if he so chooses.
His ESXi servers or other hypervisors like KVM have visibility of the state of VMs so he can dynamically
deploy policies to his VMs without involving Peter the network engineer.
If Paul decides that VM One should be able to talk to VM two, but shouldn't be able to talk to VM three.
He can dynamically deploy those access control policies through an orchestration tool.
In other words, a graphical user interface without involving.
PETA, the network person without using the CLI and without configuring the core infrastructure.
The core infrastructure is simply there to move traffic from point A to point B.
In other words, from SSI one to SSI two, he can dynamically implement quality of service as long as
the underlay network is accepting the DHCP values sent.
By the service.
He no longer has to ask PETA to implement quality of service for him.
He no longer has to ask Peter to make changes at specific times.
The virtual network can be dynamically created, dynamically torn down in seconds, rather than taking
days or weeks to deploy.
Changes all happened through an orchestration tool such as OpenStack or VMware orchestration tool.
Paul has reached his dream of being able to remove the bottleneck of Peter, the network guy.
Peter is simply there to provide IP connectivity from one server to another.
And Paul can implement his own policies, his own VLANs, dynamically on the fly.
This is a story, but hopefully it will make you think about the changes that are taking place in networking
today.
But now I want to demonstrate this.
It's all very good talking about it, but let's see it in action.