Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) is a tunneling and

virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

technology for

computer network A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...

s, created and backed by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

. DOVE allows creation of network virtualization layers for deploying, controlling, and managing multiple independent and isolated network applications over a shared physical network infrastructure.

Overview

The tunneling format is decoupled from the logical network view offered by DOVE, and defines only the way frames are encapsulated to be transferred by the underlying network infrastructure. As a notable difference from other network virtualization solutions (such as OTV), this allows DOVE not to be limited to providing OSI layer 2 emulation only (for example, passing

Ethernet frame In computer networking, an Ethernet frame is a data link layer protocol data unit and uses the underlying Ethernet physical layer transport mechanisms. In other words, a data unit on an Ethernet link transports an Ethernet frame as its paylo ...

s). Logical components of the DOVE architecture are ''DOVE controllers'' and ''DOVE switches'' (abbreviated as ''dSwitch''). DOVE controllers perform management functions, and one part of the

control plane In network routing, the control plane is the part of the router architecture that is concerned with establishing the network topology, or the information in a routing table that defines what to do with incoming packets. Control plane functions, ...

functions across DOVE

switches In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can disconnect or connect the conducting path in an electrical circuit, interrupting the electric current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The most common type o ...

. DOVE switches perform the encapsulation of layer 2 frames into UDP packets using the

Virtual Extensible LAN Virtual eXtensible LAN (VXLAN) is a network virtualization technology that uses a VLAN-like encapsulation technique to encapsulate OSI layer 2 Ethernet frames within layer 4 UDP datagrams, using 4789 as the default IANA-assigned destination U ...

(VXLAN) frame format, and provide virtual interfaces for

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

s to plug into, similarly to how physical

Ethernet switch A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, Ethernet switch, and, by the IEEE, MAC bridge) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destinat ...

es provide ports for

network interface controller A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter and physical network interface) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Early network interface ...

(NIC) connections. DOVE switches are running as part of virtual machine

hypervisor A hypervisor, also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM) or virtualizer, is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

Advantages

Primary advantages of DOVE include the following: * No dependency on the underlying physical network and protocols * Use of the existing IP network infrastructure * No addresses of virtual machines are present in

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

switches, resulting in smaller

MAC Mac or MAC may refer to: Common meanings * Mac (computer), a line of personal computers made by Apple Inc. * Mackintosh, a raincoat made of rubberized cloth * Mac, a prefix to surnames derived from Gaelic languages * McIntosh (apple), a Canadi ...

tables and less complex

STP STP may refer to: Places * São Tomé and Príncipe (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code, IOC country code, and FIFA country code STP) * St Pancras railway station (National Rail code STP) * St. Paul Downtown Airport (IATA airport code STP) in Saint Paul, Mi ...

layouts * No limitations related to the Virtual LAN (VLAN) technology, resulting in more than 16 million possible separate networks, compared to the VLAN's limit of 4,000 * No dependency on the IP

multicast In computer networking, multicast is a type of group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast differs from ph ...

traffic

Implementations

, DOVE components are implemented as part of VMware's hypervisors, while implementations for the

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

KVM and Open vSwitch are planned. DOVE extensions for

VXLAN Virtual eXtensible LAN (VXLAN) is a network virtualization technology that uses a VLAN-like encapsulation technique to encapsulate OSI model, OSI layer 2 Ethernet frames within layer 4 User Datagram Protocol, UDP datagrams, using 4789 as the defau ...

were merged into the

Linux kernel mainline The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

in kernel version 3.8, which was released on February 18, 2013. Appropriate extensions to related

userspace A modern computer operating system usually uses virtual memory to provide separate address spaces or regions of a single address space, called user space and kernel space. This separation primarily provides memory protection and hardware prote ...

configuration utilities were added into version 3.8.0 of the

iproute2 iproute2 is a collection of userspace utilities for controlling and monitoring various aspects of networking in the Linux kernel, including routing, network interfaces, tunnels, traffic control, and network-related device drivers. Project ...

utilities, which was released on February 21, 2013.

References

External links

IBM DOVE Takes Flight with New SDN Overlay, Fixes VXLAN Scaling Issues
March 26, 2013, by Roy Chua
Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) integration with OpenStack

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

, May 2013, by Rami Cohen, Katherine Barabash and Liran Schour
Building an Open, Adaptive and Responsive Data Center using OpenDaylight
OpenDaylight summit, February 4, 2014, by Vijoy Pandey
Software Defined Network

revelation day, November 6, 2013, by Igor Marty {{Virtualization software Network protocols Tunneling protocols

Overview

Advantages

Implementations

See also

References

External links