Page 11 - COMPASS, Q2 2017

All SDN approaches are focused on sepa- rating the control plane from the data plane. This means allowing administrators to pro- grammatically create virtual networks with options ranging from layer 2 solutions that span sites, through to firewall rules, load balancers and ACLS, all from a central man- agement solution. A very real comparison is the difference between using vCenter Server to manage a group of hosts, workloads and storage versus trying to do the same thing to individual ESXi servers.
Just as a proper vSphere setup brings along capabilities such as high availability and vMotion, SDN solutions bring the ability to snapshot, delete and restore virtual networks. You can even pin virtual networks to VMs; and no matter where in the virtual fabric you migrate that VM to, its configuration follows.
I don’t need to explain the importance this level of capability brings to anyone reading this article. We all watched as x86 virtualization changed everything. SDN is unquestionably thenextstep,andamarketthatIDCpredicted will be worth nearly $12.5 billion by 2020.
THE FIGHT FOR THE GAPS
On the face of it, VMware has the upper hand. Cisco’s polite, semi-open but still bla- tant attempt at hardware lock-in isn’t going to work in a world increasingly paranoid
Platform Capabilities
Distributed L3 at Scale
Scale Decoupled
of vCenter Scale
Multi-HV
ESXi & KVM (RHEL & Ubuntu) Independent NSX GUI
Intel DPDK Edge NSX-T Line Rate Packet Performance
Performance
Decoupling from vCenter
Architecture
Multi-vCenter
Scale-Out Control Plane Scale-Out Edge Cluster
Virtual Machine and Container Host
L2 and L3 Redundancy Redundant Control Plane and Data Plane
Availability
Any Compute
Figure 2. Overview of NSX-T capabilities.
about government surveillance at the hardware level. Sales pitches about “integration” and “a single throat to choke” are not winning when compared to the benefits of heterogeneous environments and diversified supply chains.
By this logic, the open standards-based competitors should handily beat all contenders; however, “open” doesn’t mean well-funded. Nor does it preclude the sort of bickering that neutralized OpenStack, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the SDN space.
This leaves VMware. NSX is hardware-agnostic. It is—at least hypo- thetically—hypervisor-agnostic. NSX even comes in two flavors: NSX-V and NSX-T, each with their own focus. Though information on the NSX-T roadmap is tightly guarded, it appears to be the branch of NSX that will take heterogeneity seriously.
NSX-T offers support for Red Hat and Canonical’s Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), VMware’s Photon, OpenStack Newton and Mitaka. There is also a beta plug-in for NSX-T providing compatibility with the Container Network Interface (CNI), furthering VMware’s DevOps
CISCO’S POLITE, SEMI-OPEN BUT STILL BLATANT ATTEMPT AT HARDWARE LOCK-IN ISN’T GOING TO WORK IN A WORLD INCREASINGLY PARANOID ABOUT GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE AT THE HARDWARE LEVEL.
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