CSAIL Event Calendar

VMware Tech Talk: “The Nicira Network Virtualization Platform: Using Distributed Systems to Build Virtual Data Centers”

Abstract:

Virtualization is a central component in many modern cloud data center architectures because it provides a convenient way to automatically deploy and encapsulate workloads. Today, compute virtualization is widely used, but it alone is not sufficient for full automation because deploying non-compute resources often requires cumbersome administrative intervention.


The network poses a major obstacle to effective data center virtualization. Today, deploying an application requires both creating its virtual machines and separately updating all its network dependencies. In this talk we describe how Nicira addresses this issue by virtualizing the network. The basic idea follows compute virtualization: we built a network virtualization platform (NVP) that exposes virtual network abstractions that have the same interfaces and features as a physical network (L2/L3 service model, counters, ACLs, etc.) but possess the operational flexibility and hardware independence of VMs. We outline the benefits of choosing this virtualization model, describe technical challenges encountered while building NVP, demonstrate operational uses cases driven by our experience deploying NVP in some of the largest clouds in the world, and propose future directions for the work.



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Speaker Bio: Jeremy Stribling (EECS PhD '09) is a Staff Engineer at VMware. He was at Nicira for three years before its acquisition by VMware, where his work focused on the distributed systems framework (Onix) that powers Nicira's NVP product. Prior to that, he spent N years as a PhD student in CSAIL's PDOS research group, where he worked on distributed systems applications and random paper generators.

For information about working at VMware, visit www.vmware.com/careers/ur

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