IETF 80 Proceedings

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Address Resolution for Massive numbers of hosts in the Data center (armd) (WG)

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Additional information is available at tools.ietf.org/wg/armd

Chair(s): Linda Dunbar Benson Schliesser Operations and Management Area Director(s): Dan Romascanu Ronald Bonica Operations and Management Area Advisor: Ronald Bonica

Meeting Slides

• ARMD IETF80 Chair Slides
• ARMD Problem Statement
• Address Resolution in VM migration
• ARMD IPv6 ND Scaling

No Current Internet-Drafts

No Request For Comments

Charter (as of 2011-03-21)

Changing workloads in datacenters are having an impact on the
performance of current datacenter network designs. For example, the
use of virtual machines (VMs) as a means for deployment and
management of new services often results in a significant increase in
the number of hosts attached to the network. Various requirements
for the deployment of VMs in data center networks, such as support
for VM mobility, has led to architectures in which broadcast domains
are scaling up to span more switching devices and VM servers, and to
interconnect more hosts (as represented by VMs).

In these deployment architectures, heavily used protocols that are
based on broadcast or multicast, such as ARP and ND, may contribute
to poor network performance. The armd Working Group will investigate
the impact of changing workloads and existing protocols on datacenter
network performance.

In its work, the armd Working Group will take into consideration work
done in data center networking standardization by other SDOs, such as
the IEEE 802.1 Data Center Bridging Task Group, and will communicate
and exchange information with these organizations.

Working Group objectives:

(1) Document the current practices in data center network
architectures and the scaling characteristics of ARP and ND with
respect to large sized layer-2 domains in data centers.

(2) Provide operational recommendations intended to minimize issues
associated with these architectures and characteristics.

Area affiliation of the Working Group:

The armd Working Group is assigned to the Operations and
Management area, and will maintain close collaboration with the
Internet area. Because of its affiliation with Operations and
Management, the armd Working Group will focus on documenting current
practices and scaling characteristics, and will not do any protocol
development or extension work.

If the Working Group identifies opportunities for protocol
development or extensions, it will first develop requirements for
that work. Any protocol development work will be conducted in the
appropriate existing Working Groups if such work groups exist. If no
such working groups exist, armd may recharter to address the work and
may be moved to a different area.

Deliverables (Informational RFCs; list to be removed prior to posting):
o Problem statement and review of current L2/L3 architectures
o Report on ARP/ND statistics collection and behavior analysis in
various Data Center environments
o Recommendations on data center L2/L3 architectures and
identification of opportunities for protocol development work

Goals and Milestones:

May 2011		Problem statement
Nov 2011		ARP/ND statistics collection and behavior analysis in various Data Center environments (many subnets with various sizes; subnets with hosts with VMs and VMs migrate over time; subnets with some hosts on local VMs and others on VMs in the cloud (like Amazon's ECS); Large subnet).
Nov 2011		Survey of Existing Implementations
Nov 2011		Survey of Security
Mar 2012		Recommendations to avoid or minimize issues caused by ARP/ND
Mar 2012		Gap Analysis