What is VXLAN? Everything about VXLAN that users should not ignore

Today, the emergence of VXLAN technology has brought many benefits to users compared to traditional VLAN technology. So what exactly is VXLAN? What makes this technology worth users' attention? All of these things will be shared with readers by Vcloudia in the article below. Please pay attention to read the entire article with us, so you can understand what VXLAN is.

What is VXLAN?

In fact, understanding what VXLAN is is not too difficult. Before exploring what VXLAN is in detail, let's just imagine it as a term widely used in the information technology field. Understanding and firmly grasping what VXLAN is will greatly help every business.

Basically, VXLAN stands for Virtual Extensible LAN. This is an encapsulation protocol that provides data center connectivity by using a tunnel to stretch Layer 2 connections over an underlying Layer 3 network.

To clearly understand what VXLAN is, we can imagine that in data centers, VXLAN is the most commonly used protocol to create overlay networks that sit on top of the physical network, allowing the use of virtual networks. The VXLAN protocol supports data center network virtualization while addressing the needs of multi-tenant data centers by providing the necessary segmentation at scale. As can be seen, the definition of what VXLAN is is not too difficult to understand.

What are the characteristics of VXLAN?

Once you understand the concept of what VXLAN is, grasping and clearly understanding the characteristics of VXLAN is also extremely necessary. VXLAN is an extension technology of the traditional VLAN; it inserts an IP into the Layer 2 Frame packet and uses the UDP port 4789 assigned by IANA. The MAC address within the UDP packet creates a tunnel allowing users to stretch Layer 2 across any Layer 3 network. A VXLAN header is inserted into the Layer 2 Frame, which is then encapsulated together with the UDP packet to be forwarded to the routing table.

When learning about what VXLAN is, VXLAN includes an identifier called VNID or VXLAN Network Identifier. This identifier is defined by 24 binary bits, which is larger than the 12 bits of a traditional VLAN, and corresponds to 16 million VXLANs compared to 4094 VLANs. The devices established between the two ends of the tunnel are called VTEPs or VXLAN tunnels. These devices can be physical machines, virtual machines, and network devices.

VXLAN can provide millions of VLANs while ensuring privacy on each network segment. This is great for businesses needing to provide Cloud services. Additionally, you may not be a Cloud service provider but simply want to expand your LAN through a WAN; VXLAN can accomplish this and supports virtualized environments as well. Besides, during the process of learning what VXLAN is, another superior feature of VXLAN that users should know is that it supports all routing protocols, making it completely capable of expanding a decentralized network system.

Refer to the operation diagram of VXLAN technology

In addition to learning about what VXLAN is, you must also enable the point-to-point IP Multicast feature. In this case, each VXLAN or VNID will map to an IP Multicast group, and each VTEP will be configured to join that group. A MAC address is mapped by the VTEP to the network segments and uses the IP Multicast protocol for routing. And these are all important pieces of information that users should know when learning about what VXLAN is.

Conclusion

Above is the basic knowledge about the concept of what VXLAN is that Vcloudia wants to share with you. In reality, understanding and firmly grasping what VXLAN is will greatly help businesses when applying VXLAN to meet demands and handle large data traffic in Cloud environments. Therefore, it is extremely important for businesses to understand and grasp what VXLAN is in order to keep up with the development trends of current network systems.

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