On the design of scalable, self-configuring virtual networks

David Isaac Wolinsky, Yonggang Liu, Pierre St. Juste, Girish Venkatasubramanian, Renato Figueiredo
2009 Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Computing Networking, Storage and Analysis - SC '09  
Virtual networks (VNs) provide methods that simplify resource management, deal with connectivity constraints, and support legacy applications in distributed systems, by enabling global addressability of VN-connected machines through either a common layer 2 Ethernet or a NAT-free layer 3 IP network. This paper presents a novel VN design that supports dynamic, seamless addition of new resources with emphasis on scalability in a unified private IP address space. Key features of this system are:
more » ... Scalable connectivity via a P2P overlay with the ability to bypass overlay routing in LAN communications, (2) support for static and dynamic address allocation in conjunction with virtual nameservers through a distributed data store, and (3) support for transparent migration of IP endpoints across widearea networks. The approach is validated by a prototype implementation which has been deployed in grid and cloud environments. We present both a quantitative and qualitative discussion of our findings.
doi:10.1145/1654059.1654073 dblp:conf/sc/WolinskyLJVF09 fatcat:4bwt5hqn75fkhdw6eo23ybs6ge