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Home/Magazine Archive/March 2011 (Vol. 54, No. 3)/VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network/Abstract

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VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network

By Albert Greenberg, James R. Hamilton, Navendu Jain, Srikanth Kandula, Changhoon Kim, Parantap Lahiri, David A. Maltz, Parveen Patel, Sudipta Sengupta
Communications of the ACM, March 2011, Vol. 54 No. 3, Pages 95-104
10.1145/1897852.1897877
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VL2 is a practical network architecture that scales to support huge data centers with uniform high capacity between servers, performance isolation between services, and Ethernet layer-2 semantics.

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Michael MacFaden

May 05, 2011 02:18

Timely article, interest is growing in this space mainly due to growth of virtual machine deployments in data centers. The IETF has a new working group in the OPS area to define what the issues are scaling subnets (ARMD) in particular the ARP and ND protocols. There is effort to make Layer 2 itself more like layer 3 (TRILL) to better load the unused links between switches. Lastly this area of research isn't new. In prior decade, one network equipment vendor introduced a protocol to scale layer 2 and provide the much sought after "flexibility" to tens of thousands of hosts (RFC 2643), saw this in production at University of North Carolina.

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