 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. Here with SiliconANGLE TVs, continuous coverage from VMworld Live 2011 in Las Vegas. Talking about networking today and joining me is Sujal Das from Broadcom and Jason Nash from Vero. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, you know, we're not on the main stage for theCUBE, but theCUBE is really kind of where we bring the smart nodes in to really share our information out there with the broader community. So, bringing you guys in, you know, we brought theCUBE together. So, I'm going to talk about really the intersections of networking and virtualization. So, just to tee it up, last year when I came to VMworld, you know, VMware came out with this really just broad vision of how VMware really saw networking changing and it seemed as if VMware might be expanding even deeper into the networking space. And to be honest, I heard a lot of negative feedback from some of the ecosystem that maybe VMware was overstretching its bounds. And what I've seen is a little bit of a refocus and we heard some exciting things from VMware this week, especially the VX LAN topics. So, got a lot to talk about in the networking space in VMware, you know, it's not just server virtualization but the networking guys, there's a bunch of them that come here. So, I guess to start this off, if I could ask each of you just to give a little bit of background on, you know, your networking background and, you know, your history with VMware in networking. So, Sudraal, you want to kick that off for us? Sure, Stu, thank you. Jason, good to be with you today. So, again, my name is Sudraal Das. I'm a Prog Line Director at Broadcom. I've been in the semiconductor networking field for almost 15 years now, having worked at AMD when AMD used to do a lot of networking a while ago. Also worked at Marvell Semiconductor, Greenfield Networks that was acquired by Cisco and then spent a lot of time at Melanox Technologies, which is a data center HPC company that has high performance gear for the industry. And then I've been at Broadcom for over a year now. Great, and from a virtualization standpoint? Absolutely. So, I've been working with VMware for almost six years now. Yeah. Starting from the days of net queue to, you know, there's been discussions about support for SRIOV and now, most recently, VXLand. So, I've been working with the VMware team for a long time, both on the controller on the NIC side as well as on the SWIT side. Been through the evolution of the 1000V architecture with, and then being a semiconductor company, we at Broadcom also look at adding value in this ecosystem because a lot of the other OEMs use our products. So, they all want to add value in the VMware ecosystem. So, we closely follow what the industry is doing in this space and add value for it. So, Sushu, I definitely want to touch on the merchant silicon aspect in a little bit. Let's let Jason talk a little bit about your role and you've been at VMworld for a while. You're actually doing three sessions here, I believe at the event. So, give us a little bit of your background. So, my background is basically, I've been more on the customer administrative side for many years, kind of as a Cisco admin years ago. Working with VMware for probably the last six years. I worked for a partner based out of Southeast on the data center principle for Vero. So, I cover a lot of our Cisco data center networking, UCS focus as well as vSphere and any of the vSphere products. So, my vision is from what the customers want and the solutions we design. So, I see a lot of the products in their emerging technology. So, over the last few years, it's been a lot of the 1000V and distributed switching, which is what I'm doing the sessions on this week. So, that's kind of my focus and what we do is putting some of these things into play and into production to help solve problems. All right, so Jason with vSphere 5 being announced and some of the other announcements. Networking was kind of, not a major focus, but are there any high points that you think we should be looking at from a? Yeah, I mean, VxLands is what I want to talk about because it solves a big customer need that we have right now which is disparate data centers in a lot of cases and disparate networks. But vSphere 5 added a bunch of things to the vSphere distributed switch. I mean, they enhanced things like port mirroring, NetFlow, other things that, you know, kind of close that gap with the 1000V for some customers. There's still a big thing, you know, a lot of requirements that have to be met by the 1000V but that gap for many people is closing for what I would consider to be a simpler, easier to manage switch. And so we're getting a lot of good feedback from that. I don't know, honestly, how Cisco feels about that but I know the customer seemed to be fairly happy. Yeah, no, so if I can just comment on that, Jason. So I mean, I spent for years talking to not only Cisco but all the other networking companies and what was interesting is, of course, you know, we understand that the 1000V allowed me to have my network administrator manage not only my physical switch but my virtual switch from the same management. And that was a compelling use case but none of the other networking companies really wanted to go down that path. And the belief was that the native networking would get, that the virtual networking would get good enough and that we really wanted to kind of have that segmentation. So kind of lead me to the next point is to, right, you know, how important is VMware in the networking space and how much, you know, where does the intelligence live? So, you know, it can be embedded. There's the silicon companies like Broadcom and Marvell and gosh, Intel just bought Fokker Micro where it was the third one I was searching for and, you know, differentiation in the marketplace in virtual environments and merchant silicon. So it, as I said, really big topic but, you know, in the networking space it's kind of exciting. There's a lot, a lot going on there. So I guess, yeah, Sujal, I mentioned a lot of different things there and I apologize for that but maybe we can start with, you know, from your company, creating that silicon, you know, how do you guys balance working with VMware and working with, you know, your OEMs and how do we still have differentiated products in the marketplace? Sure, great question. Even though there was a lot of background there, it's a great question, by the way, I mean, I commend you for putting all of that together. I'll shorten it down to a tweet when we finish the conversation. So, unlike Cisco kind of a scenario where, you know, you could create a vertical solution, right, with 1000V and create a complete solution for the end user, as a merchant silicon vendor, you know, you almost always have to create a platform that other OEMs can innovate on and they can add value with someone like VMware, for example. So what we have seen is, you know, at the high level, two trends. One is, as you mentioned, Stu, there is the desire to manage the V-switch in a switch-centric way. You know, so the notion is that, okay, the switch administrator, network administrator has been managing switches and therefore he or she should be managing the V-switch. And that's kind of like the focus from the 1000V side and even other vendors, you know, companies like BNT acquired by IBM or Arista have added value in VMware to enable a switch-like management environment for the V-switch also, right? So that's one direction and we have, you know, requests from OEMs to enable that, which means to enable what is called VM-aware switching. So that's where you need to be able to support things like virtual switch ports, so just like you support physical ports in a switch, you need to support virtual switch ports, you need to support resources for virtual switch ports, such as counters, you know, be able to support queues per virtual switch port, so that now you can essentially do switching for the VMs in a physical switch as well as you can do in a V-switch. And those are the features we are asked to implement in a semiconductor. And we do that based on standards, you know, there's VEPA that defines how you do virtual switch ports, et cetera. So that's one direction, satisfying the community that wants to manage the V-switch like a switch. Then there's the server-centric view, which is, you know, where the notion is that, okay, VMs are like servers. The V-switch is really a domain of the VMs and the V-switch should be managed like a server. It's recently, most recently, there is the notion of software-defined networks, and then also VMware and a lot of other companies, especially in the open source community, such as OpenStack, OpenFlow and others have broadened this notion where they're saying that, okay, we need to separate the virtual network from the physical network completely, just like it happened in the compute world, where the VMs are completely detached from the physical CPU and the memory. So now the thinking is that VMs, and anything to do with networking for VMs should be completely detached from the physical network, which is the notion of overlays or what VXLAN, essentially it's like tunneling over a physical network to enable that detachment. So that's kind of like the new trend. So we have to support both boats, and we add support in our switches to enable both. Okay, great. Long answer, but hopefully an answer. I've got a follow-up question for you, but if you want to comment on that, please. Yeah, I mean, just real quick, everything you said's right. So we see this kind of balance after the session today. I had someone, a large enterprise, come up and say, you know, we have the 1000D, it's great, but I feel like I'm managing a switch here, and then the physical switches, and I'm doing a bunch of things. Why can't my physical switches extend down into the virtual environment, and let me manage it just like physical ports? You know, why do I feel like I'm doing this in two places? Right. So we're starting to see that where people are like, great, this is great, but I really just want to do it from one place. And so that's where I think things really need to head and give the administrators and network administrators that single point, because right now it's very split, even when it's not split, it's still very murky, and that's been a real problem for a lot of people we deal with. All right, so while we're on the point, you know, network administrators and VMware administrators, so, listen to the keynote this morning, and of course we're talking about cloud. I believe if I quote Paul Maritz correctly, infrastructure is, you know, did he say boring or just, you know, so having you focus mostly on infrastructure for most of my career, and dealing with storage admins and network admins, I'm all for smashing the silos and helping make things better, but you know, what are the network admins saying about this vision? Are people fearful? Are they interested? And that's a great question. So I've been to Cisco Live for the last several years, and the first year, three or four years ago, I was the only VMware guy in the building. It was just network stuff in me. And then, you know, last month, I was right out here at Cisco Live again, and it's a completely different world. They're starting to understand it. They're starting to get that they need to understand it, and they're starting to see tools and the capabilities and new protocols, BXLAN, OTV, LISC, things like that, that can help solve these problems. So just as storage administrators have finally started really diving in and understanding storage in a virtual environment, the network guys are behind them. They're not at the same level yet. But we still need architects. I mean, you know, for networking, we need architects, and when stuff breaks, somebody's got to be able to fix it, you know? I'm all for the trend of the IT generalist, but at the end of the day, you know, when something breaks, somebody's be able to get in there. And it's not going to be simpler. I mean, as we float VMs all over the place, that makes applications better, makes workflow better, but it doesn't simplify things when I go to, you know, troubleshoot a problem or figure out why something's happened. Okay, great. So maybe we touched on BXLAN a little bit. You know, what is it? It looks like we're taking layer two. It's kind of the layer two, layer three boundary, specifically for things like VMotion. Sujall, it's kind of new. It sounds like you know a little bit about it. Can you tell me what you know? Sure, sure. Invite you to both of you guys to come and see the demo in our booth. It'll give you a kind of hands-on experience of what VXLAN is. But in a very simple term, I think a lot of people are familiar with Cisco's OTV. It was a significant innovation in the area of enabling VMotion across data centers. However, the OTV was implemented at the core layer. So it was implemented, for example, in the Nexus 7000 layer. The trend is something that we've seen with VXLAN as well as with other technologies that are starting to become not popular, but available or visible in the industry is to enable OTV essentially as a tunnel. You create a layer two tunnel over a layer three network. And by creating a layer two tunnel, you give the impression of a flat layer two domain so that VMs that work off layer two addresses can move around very freely across data centers. Without that, VMs can move around within a data center which is a single, flat layer two domain. OTV, with VXLAN, the values of OTV are brought down to the V-switch level, all the way to the V-switch level. So that opens up some very interesting opportunities. One is what I just mentioned. The ability to now actually provision the networking for VMs completely separate from the physical switches. So unlike the OTV scenario where the tunnels were created in the core layer or the Nexus 7000 layer, and the VM aware switching was still happening in the physical switches, with technologies like VM tag from Cisco, for example. Now that the tunnels are initiated right at the V-switch, the physical switches are no longer required to participate in the VM world, so to say. So it creates a nice separation of the physical switches from the virtual network. So that's, I think, a great advantage to VXLAN and there's overlays technologies that are being initiated from switches. There's some challenges to it. There are some scaling challenges to initiating and terminating tunnels in a V-switch in the software. I think these will have to be resolved by the industry as we go forward. There is also the need for bridging to non-VXLAN environments. For example, appliances, storage appliances, or firewalls could be, or even a non-VMware environment you need to be able to speak to or talk to. So there needs to be that bridging from a VXLAN environment to a non-VXLAN. So these are all technologies that needs to be resolved. So it's my understanding that this has just been submitted to ITF as a draft. I saw it last week when you submitted. So that means we're looking for, it's going to be a little bit of time before this is standard is adopted, but good to see VMware stepping up. I think one of the things we've been talking about is some of these boundaries between the virtual and physical layer, such as VEPA and virtual bridging, VMware and Microsoft have really kind of stepped away for that for the most part. And until they're really fully engaged, I don't think we're going to solve these problems. So gentlemen, I really appreciate you joining this. Jason, give you a last chance to, you know, I think you've been talking a lot of the end users, give us a final word on where do the users really see VMware fitting into this networking environment and how are they being embraced on that? I think it's good. I think things like VXLAN, we're really getting hit with customers wanting to do this cloud, you know, really do a cloud, not just talk about it, splitting data centers, moving workloads. OTB was great, but it required expensive switches. Lisp is great, but it's fairly complicated. VXLAN, I think it's going to take off for this reason. So I think a lot of people are going to be excited. I think it really opens the door for this utopian VM mobility that we've all been waiting for. And it's nice to see it in more of an open standard than honestly saying OTB. Well, Jason, I can't think of a better way to end this. So, Jason and Sue Joll, thank you for joining us. This is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org with our continuous coverage from VMworld 2011, talking about the utopian future of...