NVLAN: A Novel VLAN Technology for Scalable Multi-tenant Datacenter Networks

Nowadays, cloud providers of "Infrastructure as a service" require datacenter networks to support virtualization and multi-tenancy at large scale, while it brings a grand challenge to datacenters. Traditional network technologies of datacenters and common commodity devices of network can not meet these new needs. In this paper, we present NVLAN, a novel VLAN technology for scalable multi-tenant datacenter networks. NVLAN eliminates the quantity limitation of logic isolated networks on VLAN through a slight modification. NVLAN can be applied to very large-scale datacenter networks, without the need of expensive and dedicated switches. Through encapsulation of tenant's packets, NVLAN provides tenants with full address space virtualization to configure their own logic network. We implemented NVLAN on a test bed, and demonstrated that it can be scaled up to large numbers of multi-tenant networks with negligible overhead.