Tom, 

I am a bit confused of your comments. See questions inserted below: 


-----Original Message-----
From: nvo3 [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tom Herbert

Security should be considered here also. Security is strongest when applied 
end-to-end. For example, if we are encrypting at the ingress NVE, decryption 
should happen at the final NVE-- if the NVEs are on host then this implies 
packets are encrypted during all of transit.
Also, when encrypting this may be over the full inner packet so that virtual 
addresses are not visible to intermediate devices. With ESP/GUE the header 
stack might be IP/UDP/GUE/ESP/IP; vnid is visible, but virtual addresses 
aren't. Even if we are just using a security cookie to validate a VNID, the 
outer IP addresses can be considered for anti-spoofing. Triangular routing 
convolutes both of these cases I believe.

[Linda] I would think the L3 address migration is orthogonal to "ingress NVE 
encryption & egress NVE decryption". Can you elaborate how those two issues 
related? 



> In theory, host hosting by every NVE (including the DCBR) can achieve 
> the optimal path forwarding in very fragmented network. But host 
> routing can be challenging in a very large and highly virtualized data 
> center, there could be hundreds of thousands of hosts/VMs, sometimes 
> in millions, due to business demand and highly advanced server virtualization 
> technologies.
>
This is true, but there are some mitigating factors favoring host routes. 1) a 
particular NVE should only be communicating with a subset of virtual addresses 
at a given time. 2) Migrations are fairly rare events and latency to adapt is 
already assumed to be in 10's of msecs.
An extra round trip or so to relearn a host route after migration is not 
unreasonable.

So the host routes could be in a cache containing the working set where there 
is a mechanism to resolve them.

[Linda] I'd assume that NVA can always send update when a host is moved to a 
different NVE. So I am not concerned with the time taken to learn the new 
route. The text is intended to describe other options when the cache of a 
switch/router in a Data Center  can't have individual mappings for all VMs in 
the VNs supported (especially the gateway). 
 



> ECMP can be used by the DCBR or any NVEs that don’t support host 
> routing or can’t access NVA to distribute traffic equally to any of 
> the NVEs that support the subnet (VN). If an NVE doesn’t have the 
> destination of a data packet directly attached, it can query NVA for 
> the target NVE to which the destination is attached, and encapsulate 
> the packet with the target NVE as outer destination before sending it out.
>
> Another approach is to designate one or two NVEs as designated 
> forwarder for a specific subnet when the subnet is spread across many 
> NVEs. For example, if high percentage of TSs of one subnet is attached 
> to NVE “X”, the remaining small percentage of the subnet is spread around 
> many NVEs.
> Designating NVE “X” as the designated forwarder for the subnet can 
> greatly reduce the “triangular routing” for the traffic destined to 
> TSs in this subnet.
>
I'm not sure this is practical. While there are reasons to schedule VMs with 
physical locality in the DC, there are also reasons we wouldn't do this (like 
we don't want a single device failure to be able to take out all VM's of a 
customer). Also, I don't think we want to constrain the job scheduler any more 
than it already is-- it's likely over enough time that entropy will prevail so 
that VMs for particular subnets are randomly distributed across the DC.

If we designate NVE "X" as a forwarder like you suggest, then when it gets a 
packet for which there is a better route it could send the equivalent of an 
ICMP redirect to back to the originator to eliminate the triangular routing. 
Furthermore, if instead of acting as a forwarder, NVE "X" is a resolver then a 
resolution protocol could be implemented (ARP model) so that packets might 
never forwarded using triangular routing which could address the end to end 
security issue I posed above.

[Linda] agree with you. I will update the text. The second option will incur 
triangular routing for hosts that are not attached to the designated NVE "X". 
This option is only intended for a scenario where host routing is not feasible 
on some NVEs. 

Thanks,
Tom

>
>
> Linda Dunbar
>
>

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