VXLAN Demystified

Presentation Abstract:

VXLAN is one of the hottest buzzwords in cloud networking today. Lots of hardware and software vendors are announcing integration and support for VXLAN. Even OpenStack's Neutron supports VXLAN...but what is it and how does it help us solve the real world problems facing cloud operators today?

We will be covering the VXLAN spec, what a VXLAN packet looks like on the wire, and the different methods for MAC to IP learning. We will discuss how this can be put to use in modern networks and clouds as well as provide a general overview of the hardware and software generally available today that supports VXLAN.

During the presentation, we will be building a simple network of VMs configured to communicate over VXLAN. Finally, time permitting, we will take a look at Neutron's support for VXLAN and provide a simple reference configuration utilizing VXLAN for tenant traffic.

Presenter Bio:

Chet Burgess (@cfbIV) is the Chief Architect and part of the founding team at Metacloud.

In this role, he is works closely with the product and engineering teams to design and ensure that the solutions delivered by Metacloud are available, redundant, and scalable.

Chet has more than 18 years of experience working on interesting problems in IT. His career started at a VAR building computer and small business networks. Since then, he has held a number of positions including the Director of Enterprise Unix Systems at the University of Southern California (from which he graduated in 2006) and Senior Systems Architect at Ticketmaster Entertainment/Live Nation Entertainment.

Immediately prior to helping launch Metacloud, Chet was the Senior Systems Architect for Ticketmaster's Transactional API for Partners and iPhone application.

Chet's passion is working on networking, availability, and scalability problems in large scale systems deployments.