Tuesday March 17, 2009
Tuesday March 17, 2009 Crossbow: Virtualized switching and performance
Crossbow: Virtualized switching and performance
Saw Cisco's unified fabric announcement. Seems like they are going after Cloud computing which pretty much promises to solve the world hunger problem. Even if Cloud computing can just solve the high data center cost problem and make compute, networking, and storage available on demand in a cheap manner, I am pretty much sold on it. The interesting part is that world needs to move towards enabling people to bring their network on the cloud and have compute, bandwidth and storage available on demand. Talking about networking and network virtualization, this means that we need to go to open standards, open technology and off the shelf hardware. The users of cloud will not accept a vendor or provider lock down. The cloud needs to be built in such a manner that a user can take his physical network and migrate it to an operator's cloud and at the same time have the ability to build their own clouds and migrate stuff between the two. Open Networking is the key ingredient here.This essentially means that there is no room for custom ASICs and protocols and the world of networking needs to change. This is what Jonathan was talking about to certain extent around Open Networking and Crossbow. OpenSolaris with Crossbow make things very interesting in this space. But it seems like people don't fully understand what Crossbow and OpenSolaris bring to the table. I saw a post from Scott Lowe and several other mentioning that Crossbow is pretty similar to VMware's network virtualization solutions and Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switches.
Let me take some time to explain few very important things about Crossbow:
- Its Open Source and part of OpenSolaris. You can download it right here.
- Its leverages NIC hardware switching and features to deliver isolation and performance for virtual machines. Crossbow not only includes H/W & S/W based VNICs and switches, it also offers Virtualized Routers, Load balancer, and Firewalls. The Virtual Network Machines can be created using Crossbow and Solaris Zones and have pretty amazing performance. All these are connected together using the Crossbow Virtual Wire. You don't need to buy fancy and expensive virtualized switches to create and use Virtual Wire.
- Using hardware virtualized lanes Crossbow technology scales multiples of 10gig traffic using off the shelf hardware.
Hardware based VNICs and Hardware based Switching
Picture is always worth a thousand words. The figure shows how crossbow VNIC are built on top of real NIC hardware and how we do switching in hardware where possible. And Crossbow does have a full featured S/W layer where it can do S/W VNICs and switching as well. The hardware is leveraged when available. Its important to note that most of the NIC vendors do ship with the necessary NIC classifiers and Rx/Tx rings and its pretty much mandatory for 10 gig NICs which do form the backbone for a cloud.
Virtual Wire: The essence of virtualized networking
The Crossbow Virtual Wire technology allows a person to convert a full features physical network (multiple subnets, switches and routers) and configure it within one or more hosts. This is the key to move virtualized networks in and out of the cloud. The figure shows a two subnet physical network with multiple switches, different link speeds and connected via a router and how it can be virtualized in a single box. A full workshop to do virtualized networking is available here.
Scaling and Performance
Crossbow leverages the NICs features pretty aggressively to create virtualization lanes that help traffic scale across large number of cores and threads. For people wanting to build real or virtual appliances using OpenSolaris, the performance and scaling across 10 Gig NICs is pretty essential. The figure below shows an overview of hardware lanes.
More Information
There is a white paper and more detailed documents (including how to get started) at the Crossbow OpenSolaris page.network virtualization
crossbow
cloud computing
(2009-03-17 17:30:06.0) Permalink Comments [2]
Monday March 02, 2009 Crossbow enables an Open Networking Platform
Crossbow enables an Open Networking Platform
I came across this blog from Paul Murphy. You should read the second half of Pauls blog. What he says pretty true. Crossbow delivered a brand new networking stack to Solaris which has scalability, virtualization, QoS, and better observability designed in (instead of patched in). The complete list of features delivered and under works are here. Coupled with a full fledged open source Quagga Routing Suite (RIP, OSPF, BGP, etc), IP Filter Firewall, and a kernel Load Balancer, OpenSolaris becomes a pretty useful platform for building Open Networking appliances.Apart from single box functionality, imagine if you want to deliver Virtual Router or a load balancer, it would be pretty easy to do so. OpenSolaris offers Zones where you can deliver a pre configured zone as a Router, Load balancer, or a firewall. The difference would be that this Zone would be fully portable to another machine running OpenSolaris and will have no performance penalty. After all, we aka Crossbow team guarantee that our VNICs with Zones do not have any performance penalties. You can also build a fully portable and pre configured virtual networking equipment using Xen guest which can be made to migrate between any OpenSolaris or Linux host.
I noticed that couple of folks on Paul blog were asking about why Crossbow NIC virtualization is different? Well, its not just the NIC being virtualized but actually the entire data path along with it called a Virtualization Lane. You can see the virtualization lane all the way from NIC to socket Layer and back here. Not only is there one or more Virtualization Lanes per virtual machine, the bandwidth partitioning, Diffserv tagging, priority, CPU assignment etc. are designed in as part of the architecture. The same concepts are used to scale the stack across multiples of 10gigE NIC over large number of cores and threads (out of the world forwarding performance anyone!).
And as mentioned before, Crossbow enables Virtual Wire. A ability to create a full featured network without any physical wires. Think of running network simulations and testing in a whole new light!!
(2009-03-02 23:10:16.0) Permalink Comments [1]
