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Thursday, 27 February 2014

What is VXLAN?

VXLAN stands for Virtual Extensible LAN for a start.

You will come across this term 'VXLAN' very often when you go along vCloud environment. It is a very large topic and discussion on this can go on for many hours on this.


I will put this in a very simply way ... VXLAN is a technology that uses the Layer-2 and Layer-3 to help build the stretched vLAN. Or VXLAN is a technology that binds two separate layer to make them look like one.

So what does mean? Still confused...

Here is an example,

For example, there are two hosts in different DC's or Clusters having different vLAN and on them running are some Virtual Machines. If the VMs on both the hosts wants to talk to each other it will require some routing enabled. If they were in same VLAN trunking could have solved the problem, but they are in different DCs.

Let's say there are two subnet as 10.0.1.x and 10.0.9.x and you want them to appear as single subnet as 192.168.192.x, the VXLAN technology helps to achieve that.

Here VXLAN binds the two separate layer 2 domains and make them look like one. So it will make VM think that it is running on same subnet rather than different VLANs or different subnet.


Image taken from: Massimo

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