Hi Patrick, > is BGP the best alternative as the control plane mechanism?
I am not sure if it is the best, but clearly it is the one used widest today. And since data centers are not operating in vacuum it does make sense to use the same "signalling" mechanism as the rest of the networks are using for tenant isolation.
What NVO3 is trying to achieve is to setup and remove tunnels between NVEs when VM/TES are added/moved on the NVEs. So what we really need is "tunnel initiation protocol", right?
Wrong. Tunneling has gone about 10 years ago in the industry. What it evolved to is encapsulation.
The significant difference is that you need to provide only sufficient information about encap header in order to make your application work .. this is opposed to establish any end to end state (what typically tunnel initiation protocols do).
Getting this subtle difference is the key to success.
I believe that a SIP architecture is closer to that than BGP, which is basically a routing protocol.
While I respect your believes years of deployment and operational experience with BGP based L3VPNs and L2VPNs indicate at least to me otherwise. Maybe I am biased but I have never head of service providers using SIP to provide VPNs for their customers.
The NVE would be something similar as a SIP UA. When a VM/TES gets added at the NVE the NVE sends an INVITE to the "conference group" (the CUG) with its local members (MAC addresses) to the SIP signalling system.
While we could discuss details the NVE tenant will participate in many "conference groups". Those "groups" represent not only CUGs but also wide range of evolving services which will be real value add to the DC providers.
I am of the pretty strong opinion that revenue from network plumbing be it open pipe or VPN is over. The value add is in flexibility of service integration .. service being anything from appliance to big data/large job on demand processing. I do not see how SIP would help there.
Thus it would interesting to visit an SIP architecture to see what it can offer as an NVO3 control plane solution before rushing into a BGP.
As said above I am not sure the "rushing" is right term. If you look at your requirements from operators point of view we have customers interconnected with L3 or L2 VPNs. Adding seamless DC to their services is a very important service.
SIP would be detached from reality and while it may even work in it's own juice I am afraid it would have zero chance for wide industry adoption in the data VPN space.
Best regards, R. _______________________________________________ nvo3 mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/nvo3
