VL2: a scalable and flexible data center network

To be agile and cost effective, data centers should allow dynamic resource allocation across large server pools. In particular, the data center network should enable any server to be assigned to any service. To meet these goals, we present VL, a practical network architecture that scales to support huge data centers with uniform high capacity between servers, performance isolation between services, and Ethernet layer- semantics. VL uses () flat addressing to allow service instances to be placed anywhere in the network, () Valiant Load Balancing to spread traffic uniformly across network paths, and () end-system based address resolution to scale to large server pools, without introducing complexity to the network control plane. VL’s design is driven by detailed measurements of traffic and fault data from a large operational cloud service provider. VL’s implementation leverages proven network technologies, already available at low cost in high-speed hardware ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Albert G. Greenberg, James R. Hamilton, Navendu Jain, Srikanth Kandula, Changhoon Kim, Parantap Lahiri, David A. Maltz, Parveen Patel, Sudipta Sengupta
• Keywords: Communications, Data Centers, Large Server Pools, Network Architecture, SIGCOMM 2009