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-02.txt
Pages : 11
Date : 2011-10-31
With advent of 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 single server with current
technology. It is conceivable that this number can be much higher
in the future. 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-the-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
ToRs intelligently process ARP and frames, rather than simply
broadcasting them throughout the broadcast domain.
While this document addresses ARP, the Neighbor Discovery mechanisms
used by the IPv6 hosts that make use of multicast rather than
broadcast also pose similar issues in 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-02.txt
Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/
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implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
Internet-Draft.
- <ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-shah-armd-arp-reduction-02.txt>
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