Tag: vxlan

VXLAN – Virtual Extensible LAN

As the time goes by and the network with more and more virtualised servers and other devices are making that network more complicated, overlay technologies are rising to save the day for network administrators.

Virtual Extensible LAN – VXLAN is a new encapsulation technology used to run an overlay network on current Layer 3 communication network. An overlay network is considered as a practical network that is set up on the top of current layer 2 network. It also considers additional layer 3 technologies to aid flexible computer architectures. VXLAN will make sure it is very easy for network engineers to level out the right cloud computing setting while reasonably separating cloud applications and tenants. A cloud computing environment is defined as a multitenant, every tenant needs its separately configured logical network, which in return needs it’s very own network ID or identification.

What the hell that means?

What it this VXLAN doing actually. To put it simple, VXLAN can create logical network to connect your virtual machines across different networks. It is enabling us to make a layer 2 network for our VMs on top of our layer 3 network. That’s why VXLAN is a overlay technology. In “normal” network if you are connecting virtual machine to get the connection to some other virtual machine on different subnet, you need to use a layer 3 router to make a connection between networks. With VXLAN we can utilize VXLAN gateway of some sort to connect them without even exiting into physical network.

VXLAN frame

Image: VXLAN frame – taken from blog.cisco.com website