Summary
The Arista Networks’ Unified Cloud Fabric provides a fully advanced networking solution with a complete Layer 2-3 feature set which can fit in many environments such as Enterprise Data Centers or Small to Large Cloud Providers. Based on a distributed management and control plane, the fabric offers a very flexible solution for scale-out IP designs as well as for secured multitenant architectures.
With the new era of Hybrid Cloud, operators must adapt and find clever solutions to offer more services, with embedded security while minimizing the total cost of ownership and operations. Arista Networks addresses this requirement with the introduction of Virtual Networks (vNET), a logical construct in Netvisor, which slices the Fabric in multiple zones or virtual PODs (vPOD). A vNET is defined by a set of resources from the physical layer (ports) up to the management plane, with delegated administration to different vNET administrators.
The distributed nature of the Arista Networks fabric makes it unique and easy to scale with embedded network services. For some services which require more CPU resources than forwarding capacity, it is more efficient to centralize the service in a fabric node which has a larger CPU/Memory configuration instead of consuming resources on a white box switch. And, considering the scale factor for some use cases, creating and managing tenants is CPU intensive, hence offloading this task to a compute node part of the fabric is the best design.
To accommodate this increased demand of multitenant infrastructures, Arista Networks uses Virtual Netvisor, a Virtual Machine running Netvisor and joining the fabric, to optimize operations that require more compute power in the fabric.
This document describes Virtual Netvisor and how to use it in a multitenant infrastructure or a secured network with several security zones which must be implemented and spread across the network.