A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
directories.
Title : ARP Broadcast Reduction for Large Data Centers
Author(s) : H. Shah
Filename : draft-shah-armd-arp-reduction-01.txt
Pages : 11
Date : 2010-10-25
With the emergence server virtualization technologies, a host is
able to support multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) in a single physical
machine. Data centers can leverage these capabilities to instantiate
on the order of 10s to 100s of VMs in a server. Each VM operates as
an independent IP host with a set of Virtual Network Interface Cards
(vNICs), each having its own MAC address and mapping to a physical
Ethernet interface. These physical servers are typically installed
in a rack with their Ethernet interfaces connected to a top-of-rack
(ToR) switch. The ToR switches are interconnected through End-of-
the-Row (EoR) or aggregation switches which are in turn connected to
core switches.
As discussed in [ARP-Problem] the host VMs use ARP broadcasts to
find other host VMs and use periodic (broadcast) Gratuitous ARPs to
refresh their IP to MAC address binding in other VM hosts. Such
broadcasts in a large data center with potentially thousands of VM
hosts in a Layer 2 based topology can overwhelm the network.
This memo proposes mechanisms to reduce the number of broadcasts
that are sent throughout the network. This is done by having the ToR
switches intelligently process ARP packets, rather than simply
broadcasting them throughout the broadcast domain.
While this document specifically addresses ARP, the Neighbor
Discovery mechanisms used by IPv6 hosts that make use of multicast
rather than broadcast also pose similar issues for the data center.
The solutions defined herein should be equally applicable to hosts
running IPv6. The details will be specified in a subsequent
revision.
A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-shah-armd-arp-reduction-01.txt
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