As we design Business Continuity solutions for our customers; one of the biggest challenges in the past has been addressing the siloed nature of their independent data centers with respect to networking.

Consider this: Your primary data center has one IP schema and your DR data center has another. If we were to setup an Active / Active hot site scenario where you could move your compute loads between them, we would have to change the IP address of each of one of your systems as they moved through your cloud infrastructure. The automation of moving the actual compute load is not a difficult problem to solve with tools like VMware’s <a title="Site Recovery Manager" href="http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager/overview.html">Site Recovery Manager</a>.

In the past to change the IP addresses automatically of the VMs it took a lot of manual scripting and fair amount of skill with XML. I know what you thinking, “It would be really nice to encapsulate the virtual network layer in this scenario”….hold that thought.
A little while back at EMC world 2010 - VMotioning over long distance (WAN) was displayed in a truly geo-stretched environment using EMC’s VPLex. The speed at which these VMotions where shown over a WAN were staggering. However, the first thought that popped in my head was; that’s great, but what happens when the VM that was sent from Chicago to New York can’t communicate on the network because it has a different IP schema.

Enter the <a title="VXLAN" href="http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan-00.txt">VXLAN</a>, a truly scalable way to overlay the network (layer 2) for Cloud Computing models.

VXLAN – Virtual Extendable LAN has the following features.
• Logical networks to be extended among virtual machines placed in different subnets
• Flexible, scalable cloud architecture in which new servers can be added in different subnets
• Migration of virtual machines between servers in different subnets

Designing Business Continuity solutions just got easier.
More to come soon as we test the VXLAN functionality in the eGroup Lab and the NEXUS 1000v 1.5 beta.