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Virtualizing the Datacenter Fabric (PDF)

White Paper: Load Balancing System Design (PDF)

Virtual Fabric Technology

Datacenter hardware and software are evolving to meet ever-growing resource demands while administrators are striving to reducing the deployment and operating cost per resource. Virtualization has become key to achieving these goals. Two types of virtualization are currently being implemented. Server virtualization using virtual machines (VMs) has become popular in datacenters today, enabled by products such as Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware ESX Server and Xen. Storage virtualization using virtual disks (VDs) helps achieve data location independence by abstracting the physical location of the data.

FocalPoint now provides Virtual Fabric Technology which provides high bandwidth switching along with advances in fabric segmentation, data security, prioritization, latency, congestion management and flow control. When combining these advanced Ethernet switch features with IO Virtualized NICs, virtual machines and virtual disks can be interconnected with multiple virtual fabrics to provide a very flexible datacenter environment. The animation below shows how traditional datacenter fabrics can migrate into a single FocalPoint fabric utilizing Virtual Fabric Technology.

Traditional Datacenter

Several fabrics exist within today's datacenter. A server can be clustered with other servers through a dedicated HPC fabric such as InfiniBand. A separate connection can be made to disk drives through a dedicated storage fabric such as Fibre Channel. Finally, network connections can be made through a dedicated data fabric such as Ethernet.

Each server must contain several hardware resources in order to connect to these separate fabrics. In the example above, a Host Channel Adapter (HCA) would be used to connect to an HPC fabric, an Host Bus Adapter (HBA) would be used to connect to the storage fabric and a Network Interface Controller (NIC) would be used to connect to the data fabric. Each of these cards would connect to the server chip set through a PCI interface.

Advanced 10GbE NICs

Several 10GbE NICs are available on the market today that provide the advanced features required for fabric convergence. The PCI-Express IO Virtualization specification allows multiple virtual machines within a server to share a single NIC while running standard PCI software. RDMA and DDP capabilities along with low NIC latency enable server clustering through a low latency Ethernet fabric. In addition, new protocols such as iSCSI and FCoE implemented within the NIC allow the storage fabric to be absorbed within the Ethernet fabric. As can be seen in the animation above, multiple server adapter cards and cables connected to multiple fabrics can be replaced by one NIC and one 10G cable connected to one FocalPoint fabric.

FocalPoint Virtual Fabric Technology

The FM4000 devices contain up to 24 10GbE ports and utilize a high performance, low latency Ethernet switch architecture including a comprehensive suite of Layer 3 features and advanced security, congestion management and system management capabilities. These switches contain all the features necessary to enable Ethernet as the single, virtualized datacenter fabric, transporting inter-processor, storage and networking traffic.

The FM4000 supports shared memory partitions and up to 4K VLANs, which can be used to isolate separate virtual fabric domains within a single physical device. Referring to the animation above, each fabric shown can be assigned to a separate memory partition or VLAN. In addition, VLAN IDs along with access control lists (ACLs) can be used to restrict server access to certain VLANs, which adds a layer of security on top of traffic isolation.

The FocalPoint switches also offer advanced flow control and congestion management mechanisms, providing the means for creating lossless data transmission for the classes of traffic where it is required, such as storage. Finally the switches exhibit an extremely low latency of only 200 nanoseconds for layer 2 switching and 300 nanoseconds for layer 3 routing allowing high performance HPC and storage implementations.

The Green Datacenter

Power dissipation adds additional cost to datacenter operations and in some cases, limits the growth of the datacenter. Virtual Fabric Technology helps reduce datacenteD power requirements in several ways. IO Virtualization allows single IO modules to be shared among multiple virtual machines, eliminating redundant components. Switch fabric consolidation eliminates the need for multiple fabrics and also removes the HBA and HCA which are no longer needed in each server.