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Video Title: PowerVC 1.3.3 SDN Demo
Video Description:A demo of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) features available in PowerVC 1.3.3.
For further info on PowerVC SDN, visit:
IBM PowerVC Knowledge Center SDN Blog Post Video transcript:Hello everybody, today we're going to look at the Software Defined Networking, or SDN, functions available in PowerVC 1.3.3. SDN was first introduced in PowerVC during the 1.3.2 release in December of 2016, at that time it was a "tech preview" which meant it wasn't intended for production use yet, and there was no way to upgrade into or out of the tech preview. We're excited to announce that starting with PowerVC 1.3.3, SDN is now fully supported as an important part of the product, and is ready for use in production environments.
Let's start by reviewing what we mean when we say SDN, since this term can refer to a lot different things.
To understand SDN, lets talk about the world before SDN, before virtualization. In this world, we had long running workloads tied to exactly one system. Because of this assumption, network rules could be added to the switch that plugged directly into the server. When virtualization was brought into the picture, we ended up with many VMs on a single system, and VMs can move around as they are migrated from server to server. Because of this we can't set switch rules anymore, and as VM density grows we stop focusing on traffic rules, and focus instead just on making sure the VMs all have the connectivity they need.
The goal with SDN is to bring that control back. We want to be able to modify workload networking without modifying physical switches.
Key Benefits of SDN:
-quality: control throughput of workload
-automation: thousands of VMs with policy based management, rules applied quickly
-capacity: add additional network capacity to remove bottle necks
-speed: rules applied immediately throughout the network
-security: control whether workloads can talk to each other, restrict ports or IP addresses
Our SDN solution requires three main pieces: a programmable switch, a Level 3 gateway/router, and a controller. The programmable virtual switch sits in the Novalink partition. Any inter-partition communication just goes through the vswitch, and never needs to leave the system. The vswitch has rules applied to it by the controller, and the controller is PowerVC. The controller has high level policies in it, it works with vswitch to "compile" rules and apply them to enforce things like overlay traffic.
The final piece is the router. Since we're virtualizing the network, certain traffic will go into the overlay network, so we need something to put that traffic on the public wide area network, and that's the virtual router.
The SDN use cases we're supporting in PowerVC 1.3.3 are overlay networks, which is basically a network on a network. The specific technology we're supporting for overlay networks is called VXLAN. To enable these overlay networks, we are also supporting virtual routers which will run on network nodes, and external IP addresses. We'll look more at these during the demo.
To demonstrate the SDN function, let's use PowerVC to build an environment where we have 10 web servers and 2 load balancers all communicating on a private overlay network, and then configure just the load balancers with external IP addresses so they can be accessed by the public network.
#Compute#Networking#SDI