Pluribus Netvisor®2.0 Netvisor Software Features

Pluribus Netvisor®2.0
Netvisor Software Features
Netvisor is the Pluribus Networks Network Hypervisor.
Netvisor is the industry’s first and only bare-metal, distributed
network hypervisor operating system with full integration of merchant
silicon switch chips into the server hypervisor.
Copyright © 2014 Pluribus Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Pluribus Networks, the Pluribus Networks logo, nvOS,
Netvisor, vManage, vRender, PluribusCare, Pluribus Cloud and iTOR are registered trademarks or trademarks of Pluribus
Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or
registered service marks are the property of their respective owners. Pluribus Networks assumes no responsibility for any
inaccuracies n this document. Pluribus Networks reserves the right to change, modify, transfer, or otherwise revise this
publication without notice.
Pluribus Netvisor
Overview
The core Pluribus Networks idea is that for networking to join the modern world, it needs to move from a hardwarebased fixed feature-set model to one in which an operating system controls the network switch. By integrating switch
and server technologies, networking can be as advanced as servers and provide value to the data center and the
applications running there. Such a fundamental change in the control plane provides features, flexibility, performance,
management, programmability and orchestration gains that are needed to power next generation data center
networking.
This operating system, nvOS®, talks with other nvOS instances to create the Netvisor network hypervisor. Netvisor
running on server-switches is fundamentally different than traditional network switching. In the Freedom architecture,
the network switch becomes a
true extension of the server.
Merchant silicon chips are fully
integrated into the operating
system, controlled and virtualized
like a NIC, and used as an
offload/HW acceleration engine
for application flows and network
functions. The network switch is
managed by a server-class control
plane through high-speed
interconnections, thus unleashing
a new class of services and
functions to run directly “inside”
the network, such as the ability to
run scalable monitoring and
analytics for “physical” and
“virtual” (tunneled) flows, free of
taps and external monitoring gear.
Pluribus Networks Netvisor is a data center-class distributed operating system built with modularity, resiliency,
serviceability, and extensibility at its foundation. Based on proven enterprise-class UNIX and Linux operating system
technology, and enhanced through the addition of switch chip virtualization and distributed clustering technologies,
Netvisor helps guarantee continuous availability and scalability for mission-critical data center environments. The faulttolerant and self-healing design of the nvOS operating system
enables exceptional operational flexibility and makes zero-touch
provisioning of network services a reality.
Netvisor can run on Pluribus Freedom Server-Switches or on thirdparty hardware that includes server resources such as CPUs and
memory as well as switching components such as merchant silicon
from Intel and Broadcom. It can also run on a mix of the above,
allowing customers to deploy the best switch hardware per rack,
form fabric-clusters from the switches, and manage the network
functions via one distributed operating system. Each fabric-cluster
responds as one logical switch, with one distributed point of
control, to allow the network administrator to control, manage and
monitor the entire network infrastructure.
Focused on the requirements of the data center, Netvisor provides
a robust and comprehensive Layer 2 and Layer 3 feature set that
fulfills the requirements of present and future environments. With
its open programmatic API, it provides a state-of-the-art interface
to control the network fabric-cluster as a whole rather than
configure each switch individually. The nvOS network operating
system provides the level of abstraction ideally suited to multi2
Pluribus Netvisor
tenant deployments, including rapid provisioning of virtual networks and services, with a high degree of end-to-end
application flow visibility.
Netvisor provides the following innovative features, providing DevOps and NetOps with an open architecture to
program, virtualize and automate the network exactly like a server, with bare-metal performance efficiency, availability
and security:
1.
inNetwork™ SDN
2.
High availability fabric-cluster
3.
inNetwork virtualization
4.
inNetwork services
5.
inNetwork analytics
These features, as well as our core L2 / L3 networking abilities, are explored in the following sections.
Pluribus Networks inNetwork SDN
Netvisor includes a full-featured Unix-style set of APIs, which bring full bare metal control and visibility into the network
to deliver true inNetwork SDN, inNetwork virtualization, inNetwork analytics and high-availability fabric-clusters.
Programming of Netvisor is enabled by the Freedom Development Kit (FDK), which allows developers to experience true
inNetwork application programmability (with Unix-style tools such as C and Java) to support scalable and dynamic
deployment of network-aware mission critical applications.
The simple yet powerful APIs are available via C and Java code, or scriptable in a language of your choice and writing and
debugging programs is done via standard, powerful Unix tools. The Netvisor CLI and vManage GUI are written based on
these APIs, so anything available via the CLI and GUI is also available to programs that use these APIs. All control
interfaces are available at all times and can be used interchangeably and concurrently.
Through the API, applications can directly control the creation of virtual networks by allocating hardware resources such
as ports, VLANs, VXLANs, TCAMs, bandwidth and more. Applications can manage and monitor flows (by re-routing, redirecting, dropping, accounting, copying to CPU, and more) across the fabric without the need to understand the
physical topology of the fabric or the exact location of flows in the physical fabric.
With Netvisor, the entire networking intelligence is moved into the operating system (just like SDN), but unlike traditional
SDN, the software and
hardware are tightly coupled
to completely eliminate any
performance and scalability
bottlenecks of SDN
architectures that are
traditionally based on
centralized controllers. The
operating system controls the
switch chip with multi-10GB
bandwidth to make the switch
chip an application flow
accelerator similar to how a
NIC accelerates and offloads
network flows. The operating
system has absolute control of
the switch chip in the serverswitch. In many ways, the
switch chip functions as a
Figure 1: Netvisor Programmability
hardware cache of the state of
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the fabric stored in Netvisor, including L2 MAC tables and L3 FIB tables. Tables can therefore be much larger than what is
supported by the switch chip. Users can take advantage of the built-in SDN capabilities, and interface directly with the
network through Netvisor APIs to change the state of the fabric or manipulate application flows directly inside the
network.
With the Freedom SDN architecture, applications and orchestration tools have extremely low-level control of the
networking infrastructure. Virtual Flows (vFlows) provide thorough traffic flow management, providing QoS, SLA, and
analytics features including capturing extended statistics, limiting bandwidth, traffic shaping into user-definable classes,
flow-based policers, logging packets, remarking packets including tunnel encap/decap, diverting to CPU, mirroring to
CPU, mirroring to a switch port, and displaying matching packets.
For Unix x86 applications, running them within a server-switch as TIBCO does on its EMS appliance provides low latency,
minimal network hop access from servers to the application. Of course network-aware applications cannot only perform
their usual roles but can also control the network to maximize performance, reliability, and security. Network-aware
applications can program the network just as they program a server, providing new features and a network that is part of
the application rather than just underlay pipes.
Pluribus Networks High-availability Fabric-Cluster
Each Netvisor node is a member of one fabric-cluster, whether that fabric has just that one member or has dozens. The
power of the fabric-cluster is its ability to coordinate the actions of all member nodes. One fabric-wide command, issued
via any control method to any member node, causes a three-phase commit distributed transaction to inform all fabric
members to make the change. The change is atomic and either completes successfully or has no effect on any node. In
this way the fabric is always in sync, with all fabric nodes sharing the same consistent state. There is no single point of
failure, as any node that has the fabric state can share that state to a new joining node. There is no “controller” and no
scalability or failure problems that come with controller-based architectures. A Netvisor switch can unjoin a fabric and
join a different one, and within a couple of minutes its resources are now available in the newly joined fabric. Netvisor
fabric communications uses TCP/IP, so as long as two instances of Netvisor can communicate over TCP/IP they can form a
fabric.
With Netvisor nodes forming a fabric, and being able to be controlled as one big logical switch, networking now joins
servers and storage in having the ability to be programmed and orchestrated. With Netvisor-driven network
infrastructure, new virtual networks, NFV instances, and inNework applications can be created within minutes. Gone are
the days when such operations were
risky, requiring great expertise and
many manual steps. Gone also are
vendor lock-in, in which changes
could only be made by per-vendor
proprietary controllers and tools.
While we are removing DevOps and
NetOps obstacles, consider that
administrators and programmers can
login to not only virtualized
environments within the serverswitches, but also as root in Netvisor
for the ultimate in access,
manageability, script-ability,
programmability and orchestrateability.
Given the power of having a full
operating system running on and
controlling networking components,
it is straight-forward to integrate
industry APIs to provide external
automation control. OpenStack and
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Figure 2: Netvisor on Multiple Switches Forms Single Logical Switch
Pluribus Netvisor
OpenFlow controllability are provided with Netvisor version 2.0, with more on their way. See our OpenStack
demonstration videos for examples of what is possible when innovative cloud tools are integrated with innovative
networking devices.
For rapid and all-in-one deployments, in which a Pluribus server-switch plus servers is all that is needed for a fullyfunctioning cloud environment, an inNetwork OpenStack controller is bundled with Netvisor. Turn it on and start
building your cloud immediately. Pluribus also provides an OpenStack plug-in to enable external OpenStack controllers
to orchestrate Netvisor operations via the OpenStack Neutron APIs.
The Netvisor fully automated and distributed fabric-cluster provides the following advantages:
•
•
•
Applications and services deployed on top of the cluster can have fabric-wide visibility.
Any node in the cluster can have the same view of the network and offer a single (yet distributed) point of
management to help eliminate any single point of failure.
The distributed, peer-to-peer, master-free nature of the cluster makes it highly available, helping to remove any
single point of failure and leveraging a well-known three-phase commit algorithm developed for computer and
database clusters.
Pluribus Networks inNetwork Virtualization
In computing, virtualization is multi-faceted. To support virtualization, a network needs many features, and Netvisor has
them. inNetwork virtualization (Figure 3) in general is a way to liberate the network administrator from managing
separate underlay and overlay network, thus bringing dramatic operational simplification to the infrastructure. Although
Netvisor supports overlays based on VXLAN, it provides an architecture to eliminate the need for them. Consider that
traffic and fabric-cluster resources can be segregated into VNETS with traffic isolation, quality of service management,
and Netvisor services and features
mapped into the VNETs, designated
by different colors in Figure 3. Almost
all Netvisor features are VNET-centric:
create virtual routers, load balancers
and NAT translators per VNET, for
example, and run network-centric
applications in the fabric-cluster
hardware, mapping VNET traffic
through the applications. All of these
mappings can be done dynamically.
In essence you can wire your data
center once, and rewire it virtually, on
demand to reallocate resource and
change communications parameters,
all under the control of control
Figure 3: inNetwork Virtualization
planes of your choosing.
inNetwork virtualization is ideal for cloud deployments and server virtualization infrastructure. Each VNET can have
separate role based access controls (RBAC) limiting VNET administration to specific users with specific rights. Each VNET
can have a separate administrator, and a separate orchestration manager. These include our native CLI, vManage® GUI,
and API. Also available are third party orchestrations managers including OpenStack and OpenFlow. Netvisor allows the
use of multiple control planes, concurrently, to manage multiple VNETs in the same fabric-cluster, providing segregating
traffic, programming flows, and analyzing data movement all within a Netvisor fabric-cluster.
Virtual networks and services benefit both virtualized (hypervisor) and bare metal server environments. Virtual networks
consist of a software definition of the connectivity and service-level agreements (SLAs) that hosts and virtual machines
require (for example, traffic isolation, guaranteed bandwidth, traffic priority). Virtual networks support VLAN and VXLAN
for virtual machine mobility and secure traffic separation at the data plane level. The Pluribus VXLAN implementation
supports both a centralized controller for populating MAC address to VTEP bindings and can process ARP broadcasts via
multicast within the VXLAN. This means that VXLAN can be rapidly deployed in legacy networks that require bare metal
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Pluribus Netvisor
non-VXLAN capable devices to be connected to virtual machines without the additional complexity of a central
controller.
A final aspect of Netvisor virtualization support is the ability to run virtual machines within the server-switches. Nonnative applications (either yours or third party) are able to run within virtual machines within the server-switches. All
inNetwork applications have resource management and can be VNET-integrated. Arbitrary applications running on
arbitrary x86 operating systems can now reside in the network. Such convergence features can result in reducing the
number of components and complexity in your datacenter while improving performance and reliability.
By enabling network and compute resource virtualization and better automation of processes, Netvisor enables data
center managers to achieve greater agility and scale in their operations while reducing complexity and risk. It provides
flexible role- and policy-based management using resource pools, virtual networks and L3 to L7 network services for data
center virtualization and multi-tenancy in private and public clouds. Together these features improve IT productivity and
business agility. The network can be programmed in minutes instead of being rewired and/or reconfigured in days,
shifting IT’s focus from maintenance to strategic initiatives.
Pluribus Networks inNetwork Services
Netvisor enables a new class of network-aware, mission-critical enterprise applications and Network Function
Virtualization (NFV) services, leveraging compute, network and storage integration. Netvisor has server and storage as
well as switch resources at its disposal. Those resources allow Netvisor to provide services not found in a standard
networking kit. Included services comprise DNS, DHCP, PXE boot, NAT, load balancing, ACL firewalling, routing, storage
management, and storage serving via NFS, CIFS, iSCSI and SFTP. These network functions scale with the number of
server-switches in the fabric-cluster, with each server-switch adding more server and network resources. Other
applications, provided by 3rd parties or those written by you, can be run on the server-switches either natively or in virtual
machines. Such applications are fully integrated with the fabric-cluster, for example having scope limited to a VNET or
having specific traffic sent to the applications. For more details see the next section.
In today’s data centers, servers, switches, routers and other appliances are difficult to repurpose, often taking days or
weeks to configure. This challenge arises from the careful manual coordination that is needed between server,
networking and storage teams to help ensure that all the components are configured correctly. Network virtualization
and inNetwork services in the Pluribus Networks Netvisor system (Figure 4) allow components to be treated as versatile
resources that can be allocated and reallocated among application workloads, enabling a much more dynamic and
efficient use of the infrastructure
than exists in today’s data centers.
Running services in a Pluribus
Networks fabric-cluster can
eliminate L4-L7 appliance sprawl,
decrease latencies because packets
no longer need to find their way to
the location of an appliance, and
decrease the complexity of building
networks to get packets to their
appliances. Where services
currently run on servers, those
servers can be repurposed as the
network services they provide are
provided by the network itself.
The Pluribus Networks solution is the perfect pod controller for large-scale deployments of Network Function
Virtualization (NFV) on bare metal servers. The Freedom server-switch can act as a controller to install hypervisor images
(VMware, KVM, XEN, etc.) on servers via PXE booting of images stored on the server-switch. These hypervisor images can
then be used for virtual machines running Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) with transport-aware applications directing
the correct flows to each of these functions. The Pluribus solution provides for fabric-cluster scaling of NFV without the
VNF being exposed to the complexity of the network.
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Pluribus Netvisor
Pluribus Networks inNetwork Analytics
The always-on Netvisor Analytics Engine allows rapid analysis of performance state, communication status and problem
debugging (Figure 5). The analytics framework provides details from L1 through L7, including wire signal strengths, L2
tables and statistics, and L3-L7 connections and statistics, all fabric-wide without the need for knowledge of the physical
network design details. Analytics can be used real-time for current state analysis, or make use of the historical logging
features for understanding potentially hundreds of millions of flows. Fine-grained questions can be asked of the fabric
traffic, including time-based and state-based aspects.
Further, the analytics are actionable, including packet mirroring, packet capture, prioritization, classification, and packet
drop based on matching any L2-L4 headers. For example thousands of vFlows can be created automatically or by
administrators, setting some traffic as dropless while other traffic may be dropped due to suspicious activities, and others
logged for compliance or mirrored to ports for analysis by third-party devices.
The Netvisor Analytics engine is especially useful in overlay networking situations, which by nature cause complicated
traffic flows and interactions and can be difficult to analyze and debug. Many of the features available via the Netvisor
Analytics Engine would otherwise require the use of expensive third-party equipment, with resulting complexity and
support effort increases. In
addition, Pluribus inNetwork
Analytics offers rich
integration with 3rd party
analytics platforms including
QoSient’s Argus.
Fabric-wide analytics enable
customers to monitor up to
hundreds of millions of flows
in real time (with the option
of up to 6.4 TB of Fusion-io
storage), or keep historical
logging with VM granularity
for traffic including VXLAN
Figure 5: Netvisor Analytics Engine
tunnels. The network does not need
additional separate specialized network gear or network taps to be monitored. In support of inNetwork Analytics,
Pluibus offers a special SKU (F64-FL1T-SDF) that includes the required Fusion-io flash storage and SDF software
license.
Netvisor IP Services
What use is next-generation networking if it does not fully support current generation networking aspects? Netvisor on
server-switches does not require rip-and-replace and can improve existing infrastructure as well as be a key component
of next generation data centers. It does so without adding any proprietary headers, or using special interconnects.
Netvisor provides L1 through L7 networking, improving over older solutions at each step, and supports many standards.
CapEx is decreased not only by enabling consolidation but also in less obvious ways such as allowing use of a variety of
optics and cables, not just ones provided by Pluribus. At L2 the fabric-cluster provides ARP pruning to maximize the
capacity of the network. Netvisor interoperates with existing infrastructure via STP, RSTP, MST, and LLDP. At L3 it includes
static, RIP, OSPF and BGP routing and VRRP. Multicast features include IGMP, PIM-SSM, PIM-DM, PIM-SM, DVRMP and
MSDP. Multi-chassis link aggregation is included via our VLAG feature. For QoS Netvisor supports vFlow-based
classification of L2-L4, bandwidth guarantees (on the F64 server-switch), LLQ, CoS, and DSCP. For security Netvisor
implements vFlow-based ingress and egress filters and L2-L3 ACLs. To enable network virtualization with L2-in-L3
overlays, VXLAN and VTEP are included.
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Pluribus Netvisor
Taken together Netvisor provides the ability to operate a physical and virtual infrastructure without the need to run
separate additional underlay-overlay networks, which can meaningfully simplify operations and reduce the time to
deploy new applications with “wire-once and re-wire virtually” technology.
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Pluribus Netvisor
Netvisor Enables and Simplifies Next Generation Networking
Netvisor provides an open architecture to drive radical consolidation and simplification of the datacenter infrastructure. It
enables complete unification of the DevOps/NetOps management model to drive ultimate network simplification and
ease of management. The powerful feature set provided by Netvisor results in improved manageability and flexible
deployment models, and therefore better OpEx and CapEx for customers. Netvisor-based networking can be used out of
the box to improve current generation or enabled next-generation networking deployments, and can also enable nextgeneration applications.
Netvisor running on server-switches provides infrastructure simplification by eliminating:
•
•
•
•
•
Separate monitoring networks
Separate overlays-underlays
Separate external controllers
L4-L7 appliance sprawl
Separate servers for services and orchestration (PXE, DHCP, DNS, OpenStack controllers, Argus, Wireshark, and
more)
Consider your current network infrastructure, and the cost, time, and risk involved in the following tasks. Is there room for
improvement?
•
Build a state-of-the-art network infrastructure by creating fabric-clusters from Netvisor nodes.
•
Creating a new virtual network (VNET) with traffic isolation and quality-of-service guarantees.
•
Creating new services network-wide or for a VNET, such as routing, DNS, DHCP, PXE boot, Load Balancing,
Firewalling, and NAT.
•
Implementing applications that are accessible only to that VNET.
•
Implementing applications network-wide or in a VNET that provide services for that network space.
•
Moving resources between virtual networks.
•
Diverting, mirroring, logging, or shaping individual traffic flows.
•
Passing tunneled traffic, or creating tunnel endpoints for encapsulation / de-capsulation.
•
Enabling the network or VNET to be managed by OpenFlow or OpenStack.
•
Writing applications that can manage and control all aspects of the network, including creation of VNETs.
•
Understand the state of the fabric at a port, communication, and L2-L7.
•
Provide tier-2 storage in each rack for ad hoc use by servers in the rack.
All of these examples can be done with one or at most a few commands to Netvisor, changing the entire fabric-cluster,
during production operations, with low risk, and quickly.
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Pluribus Netvisor
Netvisor Summary of Benefits and Features
Pluribus Networks enables you to transform a network from a cost center into a competitive asset, unlock software
innovation on top of the network, and consolidate multiple services in a fully virtualized, multi-tenant environment.
Our products include:
•
The Freedom Series F64, combining the performance of an industry-leading two-socket Intel server with a bestof-breed 64-port 10Gb switch.
•
The Freedom Series E68, an entry level into the Freedom product line server-switch with advanced fabric-cluster
features and automation.
•
The NetVisor distributed network operating system Open Networking Software (ONS) product, available on
third-party hardware, which provides you with cloud underlay, virtualization, multi-tenancy, L2-L7 services
features and functions that are widely deployed in the Data Center.
The Pluribus Networks solution set provides many key components and aspects that are designed to power the next
generation of virtualized and cloud datacenters, including:
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•
Simplification: The Netvisor® OS manages the L2/L3 network topology and it presents to the upstream L4-L7
applications a simplified, logical view of the fabric-cluster by abstracting the physical topology.
•
Software Compatibility: Netvisor is a distributed network operating system that binds Pluribus Networks
switches into a flat, high-throughput, low-latency data center fabric-cluster. It also interoperates with any
networking operating system that conforms to the networking standards listed as supported in the Pluribus
Networks Data Sheets.
•
Single Point of Management: Netvisor simplifies the data center operating environment and provides a
distributed operating system to program the entire data center fabric from any switch as a single point of
management. This includes LAN, SAN (iSCSI, AoE), and Layer 3 to Layer 7 virtual network services such as routers,
load balancers, security, and traffic analyzer virtual appliances. Single point of management through Netvisor
can also be extended to the virtual switch and management of virtual machines on server hosts.
•
Open Programmatic API: The Netvisor OS exposes to the applications powerful yet simple APIs, programmable
or scriptable in any language of choice (Java, C, Python, Perl, etc). Through the API, applications can directly
control the creation of virtual networks by allocating hardware resources such as ports, VLANs, VXLANs, TCAMs,
bandwidth and more. Through the API, applications can manage and monitor flows (by re-routing, re-directing,
dropping, accounting, sending to CPU etc.) across the fabric without the need to understand the physical
topology of the fabric or the exact location of flows in the physical fabric. Pluribus Networks enables a whole
new class of innovative, transport-aware applications tightly coupled with the network.
•
Enables Network-aware Applications: An open, programmable platform to enable the delivery of innovative
network-aware applications.
•
Freedom: Freedom from proprietary network fabric architectural lock-ins and unification of both DevOps and
NetOps automation tools on a unified platform. Freedom from all proprietary hardware device lock-ins and the
elimination of the high-profit margin tax on hardware (including cables and optics) from traditional networking
vendors.
•
Modular Operating System: Based on the best open source code from various server-class operating systems,
Netvisor is designed to scale to a large numbers of physical switches in the data center fabric that appear as one
big logical switch and to support distributed multithreaded processing on symmetric multiprocessors (SMP),
multicore enterprise-class CPUs, and distributed network coprocessors. Computationally intensive data plane
tasks, such as application flow-level load balancing and hardware table programming, can be offloaded to
dedicated coprocessors distributed across adapter modules. Pluribus Networks nvOS modular processes are
instantiated on demand, each in a separate protected memory space and virtual machine zone. System
resources are allocated only when a feature such as a virtual router or load balancer is enabled.
Pluribus Netvisor
•
Virtualization-Aware Networking: Pluribus Networks Netvisor natively supports the VXLAN network overlay
protocol and can act as a VXLAN Gateway (VTEP) to connect to legacy non-VXLAN capable devices and offload
the host-based virtual switch from performing the VXLAN encapsulation. This feature increases the visibility of
the network administrator into virtualized traffic by providing filters and analytics that operate on the inner
packet header (i.e., the original L2 frame sent by the virtual machine that has been encapsulated within the
VXLAN encapsulation). Netvisor supports the IEEE 802.1Qbg (EVB) protocol for edge virtual bridging and
hardware-based network interface virtualization approaches such as virtual network interface cards (vNIC).
•
Elastic Fabric Computing: Netvisor supports the OpenStack Quantum / Neutron API and can optionally stand
up OpenStack, OpenFlow and CloudStack control nodes as Netvisor virtual machines running as guests in
Netvisor nodes. It provides cloud and virtualization architecture to dramatically simplify and automate the
delivery of network-as-a-service (NaaS) in multi-tenant environments.
•
Merchant Silicon: Netvisor can run on the Pluribus Freedom and Open Network product lines, as well as other
merchant silicon-based solutions that include compute and switching components.
•
Troubleshooting and Diagnostics: Pluribus Networks Netvisor is built with advanced diagnostics and
serviceability capabilities to enable network operators to take early actions based on network trends and events,
enhancing network planning and improving network operations center (NOC) service-level agreements (SLA).
Pluribus Networks phone home and Diagnostics and Online Care (DOC) are some of the features that enhance
the serviceability of infrastructure build via Netvisor. Pluribus update servers allow one-click software upgrades.
•
vManage GUI: The Pluribus Networks dashboard provides the fabric administrator as well as tenants of the
virtualized network fabric (virtual network administrators) real-time insight into application traffic flows and
connections (zoomable chart of average and peak throughput and connection rates). The Gauge offers a simple
visual indication of loads and reserves in the underlying physical and virtual resources of the network
infrastructure and helps guide capacity planning for both administrators and tenants.
•
Multi-tenancy: With Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Pluribus Networks Netvisor enables administrators to
limit access to fabric, switch and/or virtual network operations by assigning roles to users. Administrators can
customize access and restrict it to the users who require it.
•
Netvisor Analytics Engine: Fully enabled inspection of all aspects of the network infrastructure, and the ability
to act and manage the infrastructure based on metrics.
•
Services: Native per-VNET network services including DNS, DHCP, PXE boot, load balancing, ACL Firewalling,
Routing, and NAT.
•
Traffic monitoring and management: vFlow flow management, providing QoS, SLA, and analytics features
including capture extended statistics, limit bandwidth, traffic shaping into user-definable classes, flow-based
policers, log packets, remarking packets including tunnel encap/decap, divert to CPU, mirror to CPU, mirror to a
switch port, and display matching packets.
•
Monitoring Integration: SNMP V3, sFlow, vFlow, and Syslog.
•
Scale: Horizontal scale-out from one switch to many switches in a fabric.
•
Applications: Run native UNIX applications and arbitrary applications within virtual machines.
•
Virtual Networks (VNETs): Virtual Networks (VNETs) containing Virtual Resource Groups to allocate and allow
RBAC management of available resources, providing secure multi-tenancy with separate administration and
separate control planes. Segregate traffic based on VLANs or VXLANs, separately controllable and administrateable. Each VNET can have a separate orchestration manager or control plane.
•
Standards Based and Interoperable: Interoperable with existing infrastructure and implements features based
on standards where applicable.
•
Storage: Up to 4 X 2.5” disk drives per F64 server-switch, RAID protected and available for use by applications or
for logging within the server-switch or via NFS or SFTP to other equipment in the network.
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Pluribus Netvisor
For further details see our other whitepapers, use cases, solutions briefs, customer
testimonials and datasheets available at http://www.pluribusnetworks.com or by
contacting Pluribus Networks.
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Pluribus Netvisor
Pluribus Networks Services and Support
Pluribus Networks is a leader in performance-enabled network
virtualization services and support. Our services allow you to bring
revenue-generating capabilities online faster so you can realize bigger
productivity gains and faster deployments of new business models.
Pluribus Networks ensures operational excellence by optimizing your
network utilization while maintaining required levels of performance,
reliability, and availability.
For more information, please visit
www.pluribusnetworks.com
Corporate and Sales Headquarters
1-855-GET-VNET
Pluribus Networks, Inc.
To purchase Pluribus Networks solutions, please
contact your Pluribus Networks representative at
sales@pluribusnetworks.com.
2455 Faber Place, Suite 100
Palo Alto, CA 94303
www.pluribusnetworks.com
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