[illumin8]

Yes, it's just a 10GbE ethernet switch that can encapsulate the traffic in VXLAN headers, so that it can traverse east/west between any of thousands (millions?) of hypervisors without requiring traffic to hairpin to a gateway router and back. The logical networks all exist in an overlay network, so to the customer VMs, you get L2/L3 isolation. But, to the underlying hypervisors, they actually know which vNICs are running on each hypervisor in the cluster, so they can talk directly on a large connected underlay network at 10GbE (x2) line rate.

This is the standard way of distributing traffic in large datacenters. That way you get extremely fast, non-blocking line rate between any two physical hosts in the datacenter, and since the physical hosts know which VMs/containers are running on them, they can pass the traffic directly to the other host if VMs exist in the same L2 network, and even do virtual routing if the VMs exist across L3 boundaries - still a single east/west hop.

[_wmd]

So it was a mystery-inducing way of referring to some commodity SDN-related tech, thanks, that's far more informative than the paper :)

[Nrsolis]

Broadcom makes "switch on a chip" modules that will do VxLAN encapsulation and translation to VLAN or regular Ethernet frames. That chipset is available in lots of common 10/40/100 GbE switches from Arista/Juniper/White Box.

In a regular IP Fabric environment we would all this device a VTEP.

[eisenbud]

Fair point, we should just have taken the opportunity to say SDN here.

[bogomipz]

Any way you could provide a link to this off the shelf gear?

[illumin8]

Here's one that's pretty popular: https://www.arista.com/en/products/7050x-series

[bogomipz]

Ah sure Arista, I was thinking a white label OEM for some reason. I have no experience with the gear but it sounds great on paper. Thanks!

[illumin8]

There is white label OEM gear (the Arista and Cisco gear is now just OEM with their firmware running on it), but unless you're Google or Facebook and can write your own firmware, chances are you're better off with an "enterprise" solution like Arista or Cisco who will give you support and fix bugs in the firmware for you.