Enhanced IPFIX flow monitoring for VXLAN based cloud overlay networks

Abstract

The demands for cloud computing services is rapidly growing due to its fast adoption and the migration of workloads from private data centers to cloud data centers. Many companies, small and large, prefer switching their data to the enterprise cloud environment rather than expanding their own data centers. As a result, the network traffic in cloud data centers is increasing rapidly. However, due to the dynamic resource provisioning and high-speed virtualized cloud networks, the traditional flow-monitoring systems is unable to provide detail visibility and information of traffic traversing the cloud overlay network environment. Hence, it does not fulfill the monitoring requirement of cloud overlay traffic. As the growth of cloud network traffic causes difficulties for the service providers and end-users to manage the traffic efficiently, an enhanced IPFIX flow monitoring mechanism for cloud overlay networks was proposed to address this problem. The monitoring mechanism provided detail visibility and information of overlay network traffic that traversed the cloud environment, which is not available in the current network monitoring systems. The experimental results showed that the proposed monitoring system able to capture overlay network traffic and segregated the tenant traffic based on virtual machines as compare to the standard monitoring system.