VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network

Summary

This paper presents a network architecture that supports dynamic resource allocation across many servers. They aim to achieve uniform high capacity, performance isolation and layer-2 semantics. They achieve these goals by using flat addressing, load balancing and address resolution at the end-system.

The authors do an initial analysis of current data center traffic. Then, they built VL2 and ran experiments to evaluate how it performs based on the 3 criteria listed above. They find that VL2 does achieve their goals of high capacity, loading balancing fairness, isolation and convergence following link failures.

Criticism & Questions

I liked how this paper was structured. It was very easy to follow their thought process as they did their study. I also liked that they studied current traffic patterns in datacenters. It was good to have a baseline to compare with when reading this paper.