Last week Emulex announced our Virtual Network EXceleration (VNeX) technology at Microsoft TechEd. This new technology will be used for transporting virtual machines (VMs) in a Virtual Network Fabric (VNF) environment. Sounds pretty futuristic to me – like something from Star Trek!
The basic premise is that server virtualization is good. Server virtualization without the confines of traditional networking is better. You see, the advent of the transporter really opened the door for Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise to quickly and safely move between locations without having to cramp themselves into those pesky shuttles. The ability to dematerialize from the transporter room on the Enterprise and rematerialize on the surface of countless planets with only a 4-5 second delay! How many times did we see Kirk and Spock rematerialize and continue a conversation they were having just prior to the transporting process?
But I digress. What the heck does this have to do with VNeX? With Microsoft and VMware releasing their network virtualization technologies, Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) and Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), the traditional boundaries of a level 2 network have finally been overcome. These solutions allow a VM to become portable across a level 3 virtual network, regardless of its underlying level 2 network, and regardless of its physical location. This means that private and hybrid cloud environments, which need freedom to have different physical locations appear to be one virtual location, become practical. Simply put, a VM in San Francisco can migrate to a server in London without any reconfiguration or new IP address assignment.
There are a lot of virtual networking solutions out there, and Emulex’s focus is how Emulex makes virtual networking better with VNeX. The process that both NVGRE and VXLAN go through to transport that VM from one physical network to another requires a tremendous amount of processing power. While Moore’s Law might allow for the doubling of processing power on a chip every 18 months, this process can tax even the latest CPUs. Our testing has shown that the process to encapsulate these VMs for transportation can add up to a 27% tax on network throughput due to the CPU utilization it requires.
With VNeX, Emulex will be able to recapture the vast majority of that network bandwidth by offloading critical processing from the host CPU to the NIC. For a more thorough explanation of this, I encourage you to read the Emulex Labs blog that Brandon Hoff wrote last week.
So, in effect, VNeX is the Heisenberg Compensator portion of the transporter! Without it, the Heisenberg uncertainty principal would certainly make for some interesting rematerializations, since the transporter wouldn’t be able to account for the position or momentum of target particles. Not an attractive visual…
The message is clear – don’t let the Heisenberg uncertainty principal byte you in the network. Emulex’s Heisenberg Compensator, I mean VNeX, will allow you to avoid those embarrassing moments and ensure you get the right head on the right body.
