Internet DRAFT - draft-dt-nvo3-encap

draft-dt-nvo3-encap



 



INTERNET-DRAFT                                         Sami Boutros(Ed.)
Intended Status: Informational                                    VMware

Ignas Bagdonas                                                Sam Aldrin
Equinix                                                           Google

Matthew Bocci                                                  Uri Elzur
Nokia                                                       Ilango Ganga
                                                                   Intel

Pankaj Garg                                                 Rajeev Manur
Microsoft                                                       Broadcom

Tal Mizrahi                                                  David Mozes
Marvell                                                         Mellanox

Erik Nordmark                                              Michael Smith
Arista Networks                                                    Cisco

Expires: September 13, 2017                               March 12, 2017


                   NVO3 Encapsulation Considerations 
                         draft-dt-nvo3-encap-01


Abstract

   As communicated by WG Chairs, the IETF NVO3 chairs and Routing Area
   director have chartered a design team to take forward the
   encapsulation discussion and see if there is potential to design a
   common encapsulation that addresses the various technical concerns.

   There are implications of different encapsulations in real
   environments consisting of both software and hardware implementations
   and spanning multiple data centers. For example, OAM functions such
   as path MTU discovery become challenging with multiple encapsulations
   along the data path. 

   The design team recommend Geneve with few modifications as the common
   encapsulation, more details are described in section 7.


Status of this Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

 


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Table of Contents

   1. Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   2. Design Team Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   3. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   4. Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   5. Issues with current Encapsulations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     5.1 Geneve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     5.2 GUE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     5.3 VXLAN-GPE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   6. Common Encapsulation Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     6.1 Current Encapsulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     6.2 Useful Extensions Use cases  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
       6.2.1. Telemetry extensions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
 


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       6.2.2. Security/Integrity extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
       6.2.3. Group Base Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
     6.3 Hardware Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
     6.4 Extension Size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
     6.5 Extension Ordering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     6.6 TLV vs Bit Fields  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     6.7 Control Plane Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     6.8 Split NVE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
     6.9 Larger VNI Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   7. Design team recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   8. Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
   9. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
   10.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
     10.1  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
     10.2  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
   11. Appendix A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
     11.1.  Overview  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
     11.2.  Extensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
       11.2.1.  Native Extensibility Support  . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
       11.2.2.  Extension Parsing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
       11.2.3.  Critical Extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
       11.2.4.  Maximal Header Length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
     11.3.  Encapsulation Header  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
       11.3.1.  Virtual Network Identifier (VNI)  . . . . . . . . . . 15
       11.3.2.  Next Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
       11.3.3.  Other Header Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
     11.4.  Comparison Summary  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
   Authors' Addresses (In alphabetical order) . . . . . . . . . . . . 17




















 


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1. Problem Statement

   As communicated by WG Chairs, the NVO3 WG charter states that it may
   produce requirements for network virtualization data planes based on
   encapsulation of virtual network traffic over an IP-based underlay
   data plane. Such requirements should consider OAM and security. Based
   on these requirements the WG will select, extend, and/or develop one
   or more data plane encapsulation format(s).

   This has led to drafts describing three encapsulations being adopted
   by the working group:

   - draft-ietf-nvo3-geneve-03

   - draft-ietf-nvo3-gue-04

   - draft-ietf-nvo3-vxlan-gpe-02

   Discussion on the list and in face-to-face meetings has identified a
   number of technical problems with each of these encapsulations.
   Furthermore, there was clear consensus at the IETF meeting in Berlin
   that it is undesirable for the working group to progress more than
   one data plane encapsulation. Although consensus could not be reached
   on the list, the overall consensus was for a single encapsulation
   (RFC2418, Section 3.3). Nonetheless there has been resistance to
   converging on a single encapsulation format.

2. Design Team Goals

   As communicated by WG Chairs, the design team should take one of the
   proposed encapsulations and enhance it to address the technical
   concerns. Backwards compatibility with the chosen encapsulation and
   the simple evolution of deployed networks as well as applicability to
   all locations in the NVO3 architecture are goals. The DT should
   specifically avoid a design that is burdensome on hardware
   implementations, but should allow future extensibility. The chosen
   design should also operate well with ICMP and in ECMP environments.
   If further extensibility is required, then it should be done in such
   a manner that it does not require the consent of an entity outside of
   the IETF.

3. Terminology

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

4. Abbreviations
 


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   NVO3 Network Virtualization Overlays over Layer 3

   OAM Operations, Administration, and Maintenance

   TLV Type, Length, and Value

   VNI Virtual Network Identifier

   NVE Network Virtualization Edge

   NVA Network Virtualization Authority 

   NIC Network interface card

   Transit device Underlay network devices between NVE(s).


5. Issues with current Encapsulations

   As summarized by WG Chairs.

5.1 Geneve

   - Can't be implemented cost-effectively in all use cases because
   variable length header and order of the TLVs makes is costly (in
   terms of number of gates) to implement in hardware

   - Fork-lift upgrade from widely deployed VXLAN (no backwards
   compatibility mechanisms)

   - Header doesn't fit into largest commonly available parse buffer
   (256 bytes in NIC). Cannot justify doubling buffer size unless it is
   mandatory for hardware to process additional option fields.

5.2 GUE

   - There were a significant number of objections related to the
   complexity of implementation in hardware, similar to those noted for
   Geneve above.

   - In addition, there were concerns raised that GUE does not support a
   sufficient number of extensions due to its reliance on a limited
   flags field, which is already almost 45% allocated.


5.3 VXLAN-GPE

   - GPE is not day-1 backwards compatible with VXLAN. Although the
 


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   frame format is similar, it uses a different UDP port, so would
   require changes to existing implementations even if the rest of the
   GPE frame is the same.

   - GPE is insufficiently extensible. Numerous extensions and options
   have been designed for GUE and Geneve. Note that these have not yet
   been validated by the WG.

   - Security e.g. of the VNI has not been addressed by GPE. Although a
   shim header could be used for security and other extensions, this has
   not been defined yet and its implications on offloading in NICs are
   not understood.

6. Common Encapsulation Considerations

6.1 Current Encapsulations 

   Appendix A includes a detailed comparison between the three proposed
   encapsulations. The comparison indicates several common properties,
   but also three major differences among the encapsulations:

   - Extensibility: Geneve and GUE were defined with built-in
   extensibility, while VXLAN-GPE is not inherently extensible. Note
   that any of the three encapsulations can be extended using the
   Network Service Header (NSH).

   - Extension method: Geneve is extensible using Type/Length/Value
   (TLV) fields, while GUE uses a small set of possible extensions, and
   a set of flags that indicate which extension is present.

   - Length field: Geneve and GUE include a Length field, indicating the
   length of the encapsulation header, while VXLAN-GPE does not include
   such a field.

6.2 Useful Extensions Use cases

   Non vendor specific TLV MUST follow the standardization process. The
   following use cases for extensions shows that there is a strong
   requirement to support variable length extensions with possible
   different subtypes.

6.2.1. Telemetry extensions.


   In several scenarios it is beneficial to make information about the
   path a packet took through the network or through a network device as
   well as associated telemetry information available to the operator.

 


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   This includes not only tasks like debugging, troubleshooting, as well
   as network planning and network optimization but also policy or
   service level agreement compliance checks.

   Packet scheduling algorithms, especially for balancing traffic across
   equal cost paths or links, often leverage information contained
   within the packet, such as protocol number, IP-address or MAC-
   address. Probe packets would thus either need to be sent from the
   exact same endpoints with the exact same parameters, or probe packets
   would need to be artificially constructed as "fake" packets and
   inserted along the path. Both approaches are often not feasible from
   an operational perspective, be it that access to the end-system is
   not feasible, or that the diversity of parameters and associated
   probe packets to be created is simply too large. An in-bound
   telemetry mechanism in extensions is an alternative in those cases.

6.2.2. Security/Integrity extensions


   Since the currently proposed NVO3 encapsulations do not protect their
   headers a single bit corruption in the VNI field could deliver a
   packet to the wrong tenant. Extensions are needed to use any
   sophisticated security. 

   The possibility of VNI spoofing with an NVO3 protocol is exacerbated
   by the use of UDP. Systems typically have no restrictions on
   applications being able to send to any UDP port so an unprivileged
   application can trivially spoof for instance, VXLAN packets,
   including using arbitrary VNIs.

   One can envision HMAC-like support in some NVO3 extension to
   authenticate the header and the outer IP addresses, thereby
   preventing attackers from injecting packets with spoofed VNIs.

   An other aspect of security is payload security. Essentially this is
   to make packets that look like IP|UDP|NVO3 Encap|DTLS
   Extension|payload. This is nice since we still have the UDP header
   for ECMP, the NVO3 header is in plain text so it can by read by
   network elements, and different security or other payload transforms
   can be supported on a single UDP port (we don't need a separate UDP
   for DTLS).

6.2.3. Group Base Policy 

   Another use case would be to carry the Group Based Policy (GBP)
   source group information within a NVO3 header extension in a similar
   manner as has been implemented for VXLAN [VXLAN-GBP]. This allows
   various forms of policy such as access control and QoS to be applied
 


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   between abstract groups rather than coupled to specific endpoint
   addresses.

6.3 Hardware Considerations

   Hardware restrictions should be taken into consideration along with
   future hardware enhancements that may provide more flexible metadata
   processing. However, the set of options that need to and will be
   implemented in hardware will be a subset of what is implemented in
   software, since software NVEs are likely to grow features, and hence
   option support, at a more rapid rate.

   We note that it is hard to predict which options will be implemented
   in which piece of hardware and when. That depends on whether the
   hardware will be in the form of a NIC providing increasing offload
   capabilities to software NVEs, or a switch chip being used as an NVE
   gateway towards non-NVO3 parts of the network, or even an transit
   devices that participates in the NVO3 dataplane e.g. for OAM
   purposes.

   A result of this is that it doesn't look useful to prescribe some
   order of the option so that the ones that are likely to be
   implemented in hardware come first; we can't decide such an order
   when we define the options, however a control plane can enforce such
   order for some hardware implementations.

   We do know that hardware needs to initially be able to efficiently
   skip over the NVO3 header to find the inner payload. That is needed
   for both NICs doing e.g. TCP offload and transit devices and NVEs
   applying policy/ACLs to the inner payload.

6.4 Extension Size

   Extension header length has a significant impact to hardware and
   software implementations. A total header length that is too small
   will unnecessarily constrained software flexibility. A total header
   length that is too large will place a nontrivial cost on hardware
   implementations. Thus, the design team recommends that there be a
   minimum and maximum total extension header length selected. The
   maximum total header length is determined by the bits allocated for
   the total extension header length field. The risk with this approach
   is that it may be difficult to extend the total header size in the
   future. The minimum total header length is determined by a
   requirement in the specifications that all implementations must meet.
   The risk with this approach is that all implementations will only
   implement the minimum total header length which would then become the
   de facto maximum total header length. The recommended minimum total
   header length is 64 bytes.
 


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   Single Extension size should always be 4 bytes aligned.

   The maximum length of a single option should be large enough to meet
   the different extension use case requirements e.g. in-band telemetry
   and future use. 


6.5 Extension Ordering

   In order to support hardware nodes at the tunnel endpoint or at the
   transit that can process one or few extensions TLVs in TCAM. A
   control plane in such a deployment can signal a capability to ensure
   a specific TLV will always appear in a specific order for example the
   first one in the packet. 

   The order of the TLVs should be HW friendly for both the sender and
   the receiver and possibly the transit node too.

   A transit node may need to process some extensions like telemetry
   and/or OAM inband extensions.


6.6 TLV vs Bit Fields 

   If there is a well-known initial set of options that are likely to be
   implemented in software and in hardware, it can be efficient to use
   the bit-field approach as in GUE. However, as described in section
   6.3, if options are added over time and different subsets of options
   are likely to be implemented in different pieces of hardware, then it
   would be hard for the IETF to specify which options should get the
   early bit fields. TLVs are a lot more flexible, which avoids the need
   to determine the relative importance different options. However,
   general TLV of arbitrary order, size, and repetition of the same
   order is difficult to implement in hardware. A middle ground is to
   use TLV with restrictions on the size and alignment, observing that
   individual TLVs can have a fixed length, and support in the control
   plane such that an NVE will only receive options that to needs and
   implements. The control plane approach can potentially be used to
   control the order of the TLVs sent to a particular NVE. Note that
   transit devices are not likely to participate in the control plane
   hence to the extent that they need to participate in option
   processing they need more effort, But transit devices would have
   issues with future GUE bits being defined for future options as well.

   A benefit of TLVs  from a HW perspective is that they are self
   describing i.e., all the information is in the TLV. In a Bit fields
   approach the hardware needs to look up the bit to determine the
   length of the data associated with the bit through some separate
 


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   table, which would add hardware complexity.

   There are use cases where multiple modules of software are running on
   NVE. This can be modules such as a diagnostic module by one vendor
   that does packet sampling and another module from a different vendor
   that does a firewall. Using a TLV format, it is easier to have
   different software modules process different TLVs, which could be
   standard extensions or vendor specific extensions defined by the
   different vendors, without conflicting with each other. This can help
   with hardware modularity as well. 

6.7 Control Plane Considerations

   Given that we want to allow large flexibility and extensibility for
   e.g. software NVEs, yet be able to support key extensions in less
   flexible e.g. hardware NVEs, it is useful to consider the control
   plane. By control plane in this context we mean both protocols such
   as EVPN and others, and also deployment specific configuration. 

   If each NVE can express in the control plane that they only care
   about particular extensions (could be a single extension, or a few),
   and the source NVEs only include requested extensions in the NVO3
   packets, then the target NVE can both use a simpler parser (e.g., a
   TCAM might be usable to look for a single NVO3 extension) and the
   depth of the inner payload in the NVO3 packet will be minimized.
   Furthermore, if the target NVE cares about a few extensions and can
   express in the control plane the desired order of those extensions in
   the NVO3 packets, then it can provide useful functionality with
   minimal hardware requirements.

   Note that transit devices that are not aware of the NVO3 extensions
   somewhat benefit from such an approach, since the inner payload is
   less deep in the packet if no extraneous extensions are included in
   the packet. However, in general a transit device is not likely to
   participate in the NVO3 control plane. (However, configuration
   mechanisms can take into account limitations of the transit devices
   used in particular deployments.) 

   Note that in this approach different NVEs could desire different
   (sets of) extensions, which means that the source NVE needs to be
   able to place different sets of extensions in different NVO3 packets,
   and perhaps in different order. It also assumes that underlay
   multicast or replication servers are not used together with NVO3
   extensions.

   There is a need to consider mandatory extensions versus optional
   extensions. Mandatory extensions require the receiver to drop the
   packet if the extension is unknown. A control plane mechanism can
 


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   prevent the need for dropping unknown extensions, since they would
   not be included to targets that do not support them.

   The control planes defined today need to add the ability to describe
   the different encapsulations. Thus perhaps EVPN, and any other
   control plane protocol that the IETF defines, should have a way to
   enumerate the supported NVO3 extensions and their order.


6.8 Split NVE


   If the working group sees a need for having the hosts send and
   receive options in a split NVE case, this is possible using any of
   the existing extensible encapsulations (Geneve, GUE, GPE+NSH) by
   defining a way to carry those over other transports. NSH can already
   be used over different transports.

   If we need to do this with other encapsulations it can be done by
   defining an Ether type for other encapsulations so that it can be
   carried over Ethernet and 802.1Q.

   If we need to carry other encapsulations over MPLS, it would require
   an EVPN control plane to signal that other encapsulation header +
   options will be present in front of the L2 packet. The VNI can be
   ignored in the header, and the MPLS label will be the one used to
   identify the EVPN L2 instance.


6.9 Larger VNI Considerations

   We discussed whether we should make VNI 32-bits or larger. The
   benefit of 24-bit VNI would be to avoid unnecessary changes with
   existing proposals and implementations that are almost all, if not
   all, are using 24-bit VNI. If we need a larger VNI, an extension can
   be used to support that. 


7. Design team recommendations

   We concluded that Geneve is most suitable as a starting point for
   proposed standard for network virtualization, for the following
   reasons:

   1. We studied whether VNI should be in base header or in extensions
   and whether it should be 24-bit or 32-bit. The design team agreed
   that VNI is critical information for network virtualization and MUST
   be present in all packets. Design team also agreed that 24-bit VNI
 


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   matches the existing widely used encapsulation format i.e. VxLAN and
   NVGRE and hence more suitable to use going forward. 

   2. Geneve has the total options length that allow skipping over the
   options for NIC offload operations, and will allow transit devices to
   view flow information in the inner payload.

   3. We considered the option of using NSH with VxLAN-GPE but given
   that NSH is targeted at service chaining and contains service
   chaining information, it is less suitable for the network
   virtualization use case. The other downside for VxLAN-GPE was lack of
   header length in VxLAN-GPE and hence makes skipping over the headers
   to process inner payload more difficult. Total Option Length is
   present in Geneve. It is not possible to skip any options in the
   middle with VxLAN-GPE. In principle a split between a base header and
   a header with options is interesting (whether that options header is
   NSH or some new header without ties to a service path). We explored
   whether it would make sense to either use NSH for this, or define a
   new NVO3 options header. However, we observed that this makes it
   slightly harder to find the inner payload since the length field is
   not in the NVO3 header itself. Thus one more field would have to be
   extracted to compute the start of the inner payload. Also, if  the
   experience with IPv6 extension headers is a guidance, there would be
   a risk that key pieces of hardware might not implement the options
   header, resulting in future calls to deprecate its use. Making the
   options part of the base NVO3 header has less of those issues. Even
   though the implementation of any particular option can not be
   predicted ahead of time, the option mechanism and ability to skip the
   options is likely to be broadly implemented.

   4. We compared the TLV vs Bit-fields style extension and it was
   deemed that parsing both TLV and bit-fields is expensive and while
   bit-fields may be simpler to parse, it is also more restrictive and
   requires guessing which extensions will be widely implemented so they
   can get early bit assignments for efficiency, as well Bit-fields are
   not flexible enough to address the requirement of variable length and
   different subtypes of the same option. While TLV are more flexible, a
   control plane can restrict the number of option TLVs as well the
   order and size of the TLVs to make it simpler for a dataplane
   implementation to handle.

   5. We briefly discussed multi-vendor NVE case, and the need to allow
   vendors to put their own extensions in the NVE header. This is
   possible with TLVs. 

   6. We also agreed that the C bit in Geneve is helpful to allow
   receiver NVE to easily decide whether to process options or not. For
   example a UUID based packet trace and how an optional extension such
 


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   as that can be ignored by receiver NVE and thus make it easy for NVE
   to skip over the options. Thus the C-bit remains as defined in
   Geneve.

   7. There are already some extensions that are being discussed (see
   section 6.2) of varying sizes, by using Geneve option it is possible
   to get in band parameters like: switch id, ingress port, egress port,
   internal delay, and queue in telemetry defined extension TLV from
   switches. It is also possible to add Security extension TLVs like
   HMAC and DTLS to authenticate the Geneve packet header and secure the
   Geneve packet payload by software or hardware tunnel endpoints. As
   well, a Group Based Policy extension TLV can be carried.


   There seems to be interest to standardize some well known secure
   option TLVs to secure the header and payload to guarantee
   encapsulation header integrity and tenant data privacy. The design
   team recommends that the working group consider standardizing such
   option(s).

   We recommend the following enhancements to Geneve to make it more
   suitable to hardware and yet provide the flexibility for software:

   We would propose a text such as, while TLV are more flexible, a
   control plane can restrict the number of option TLVs as well the
   order and size of the TLVs to make it simpler for a data plane
   implementation in software or hardware to handle. For example, there
   may be some critical information such as secure hash that must be
   processed in certain order at lowest latency.

   A control plane can negotiate a subset of option TLVs and certain TLV
   ordering, as well can limit the total number of option TLVs present
   in the packet, for example, to allow hardware capable of processing
   fewer options. Hence, the control planes need to have the ability to
   describe the supported TLVs subset and their order.

   The Geneve draft could specify that the subset and order of option
   TLVs should be configurable for each remote NVE in the absence of a
   protocol control plane.


8. Acknowledgements

   Tom Herbert provided the motivation for the Security/Integrity
   extension.

9. Security Considerations

 


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   This document does not introduce any additional security constraints.


10.  References

10.1  Normative References

   [KEYWORDS] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
   Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

10.2  Informative References

   [Geneve] Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation [I-D.ietf-nvo3-
   geneve]
   [GUE] Generic UDP Encapsulation [I-D.ietf-nvo3-gue]
   [NSH] Network Service Header [I-D.ietf-sfc-nsh]
   [VXLAN-GPE] Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network - Generic Protocol
   Extension [I-D.ietf-nvo3-vxlan-gpe]

   [VXLAN-GBP] VXLAN Group Policy Option - [I-D.draft-smith-vxlan-group-
   policy-03]


11. Appendix A

11.1.  Overview

   This section presents a comparison of the three NVO3 encapsulation
   proposals, Geneve, GUE, and VXLAN-GPE.  The three encapsulations use
   an outer UDP/IP transport.  Geneve and VXLAN-GPE use an 8-octet
   header, while GUE uses a 4-octet header.  In addition to the base
   header, optional extensions may be included in the encapsulation, as
   discussed in Section 3.2 below.


11.2.  Extensibility

11.2.1.  Native Extensibility Support

   The Geneve and GUE encapsulations both enable optional headers to be
   incorporated at the end of the base encapsulation header.

   VXLAN-GPE does not provide native support for header extensions.
   However, as discussed in [I-D.ietf-nvo3-vxlan-gpe], extensibility can
   be attained to some extent if the Network Service Header (NSH) [I-
   D.ietf-sfc-nsh] is used immediately following the VXLAN-GPE header. 
   NSH supports either a fixed-size extension (MD Type 1), or a
   variable-size TLV-based extension (MD Type 2).  It should be noted
 


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   that NSH-over-VXLAN-GPE implies an additional overhead of the 8-
   octets NSH header, in addition to the VXLAN-GPE header.


11.2.2.  Extension Parsing

   The Geneve Variable Length Options are defined as
   Type/Length/Value(TLV) extensions.  Similarly, VXLAN-GPE, when using
   NSH, can include NSH TLV-based extensions.  In contrast, GUE defines
   a small set of possible extension fields (proposed in [I-D.herbert-
   gue-extensions]), and a set of flags in the GUE header that indicate
   for each extension type whether it is present or not.

   TLV-based extensions, as defined in Geneve, provide the flexibility
   for a large number of possible extension types. Similar behavior can
   be supported in NSH-over-VXLAN-GPE when using MD Type 2. The flag-
   based approach taken in GUE strives to simplify implementations by
   defining a small number of possible extensions, used in a fixed
   order.

   The Geneve and GUE headers both include a length field, defining the
   total length of the encapsulation, including the optional extensions.

   The length field simplifies the parsing of transit devices that skip
   the encapsulation header without parsing its extensions.

11.2.3.  Critical Extensions

   The Geneve encapsulation header includes the 'C' field, which
   indicates whether the current Geneve header includes critical
   options, which must be parsed by the tunnel endpoint. If the endpoint
   is not able to process the critical option, the packet is discarded.

11.2.4.  Maximal Header Length

   The maximal header length in Geneve, including options, is 260
   octets.  GUE defines the maximal header to be 128 octets. VXLAN-GPE
   uses a fixed-length header of 8 octets, unless NSH-over-VXLAN-GPE is
   used, yielding an encapsulation header of up to 264 octets.


11.3.  Encapsulation Header

11.3.1.  Virtual Network Identifier (VNI)

   The Geneve and VXLAN-GPE headers both include a 24-bit VNI field.
   GUE, on the other hand, enables the use of a 32-bit field called
   VNID; this field is not included in the GUE header, but was defined
 


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   as an optional extension in [I-D.herbert-gue-extensions].

   The VXLAN-GPE header includes the 'I' bit, indicating that the VNI
   field is valid in the current header.  A similar indicator is defined
   as a flag in the GUE header [I-D.herbert-gue-extensions].


11.3.2.  Next Protocol

   The three encapsulation headers include a field that specifies the
   type of the next protocol header, which resides after the NVO3
   encapsulation header.  The Geneve header includes a 16-bit field that
   uses the IEEE Ethertype convention.  GUE uses an 8-bit field, which
   uses the IANA Internet protocol numbering.  The VXLAN-GPE header
   incorporates an 8-bit Next Protocol field, using a VXLAN-GPE-specific
   registry, defined in [I-D.ietf-nvo3-vxlan-gpe].

   The VXLAN-GPE header also includes the 'P' bit, which explicitly
   indicates whether the Next Protocol field is present in the current
   header.


11.3.3.  Other Header Fields

   The OAM bit, which is defined in Geneve and in VXLAN-GPE, indicates
   whether the current packet is an OAM packet.  The GUE header includes
   a similar field, but uses different terminology; the GUE 'C-bit'
   specifies whether the current packet is a control packet.  Note that
   the GUE control bit can potentially be used in a large set of
   protocols that are not OAM protocols.  However, the control packet
   examples discussed in [I-D.ietf-nvo3-gue] are OAM-related.

   Each of the three NVO3 encapsulation headers includes a 2-bit Version
   field, which is currently defined to be zero.

   The Geneve and VXLAN-GPE headers include reserved fields; 14 bits in
   the Geneve header, and 27 bits in the VXLAN-GPE header are reserved.


11.4.  Comparison Summary

   The following table summarizes the comparison between the three NVO3
   encapsulations.

     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     |                |     Geneve     |      GUE       |   VXLAN-GPE    |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Outer transport|     UDP/IP     |     UDP/IP     |     UDP/IP     |
 


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     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Base header    |    8 octets    |    4 octets    |    8 octets    |
     | length         |                |                |  (16 octets    |
     |                |                |                |   using NSH)   |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Extensibility  |Variable length |Extension fields| No native ext- |
     |                |    options     |                | ensibility.    |
     |                |                |                | Extensible     |
     |                |                |                | using NSH.     |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Extension      |   TLV-based    |   Flag-based   |   TLV-based    |
     | parsing method |                |                |(using NSH with |
     |                |                |                |   MD Type 2)   |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Extension      |    Variable    |     Fixed      |    Variable    |
     | order          |                |                |  (using NSH)   |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Length field   |       +        |       +        |       -        |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Max Header     |   260 octets   |   128 octets   |    8 octets    |
     | Length         |                |                |(264 using NSH) |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Critical exte- |       +        |       -        |       -        |
     | nsion bit      |                |                |                |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | VNI field size |    24 bits     |    32 bits     |    24 bits     |
     |                |                |  (extension)   |                |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Next protocol  |    16 bits     |     8 bits     |     8 bits     |
     | field          |   Ethertype    | Internet prot- |  New registry  |
     |                |   registry     | ocol registry  |                |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Next protocol  |       -        |       -        |       +        |
     | indicator      |                |                |                |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | OAM / control  |    OAM bit     |  Control bit   |    OAM bit     |
     | field          |                |                |                |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Version field  |    2 bits      |    2 bits      |    2 bits      |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
     | Reserved bits  |    14 bits     |       -        |    27 bits     |
     +----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+

                     Figure 1: NVO3 Encapsulation Comparison


Authors' Addresses (In alphabetical order)

 


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   Sam Aldrin 
   Google 
   Email: aldrin.ietf@gmail.com 

   Ignas Bagdonas 
   Equinix 
   Email: ibagdona.ietf@gmail.com

   Matthew Bocci 
   Nokia
   Email: matthew.bocci@nokia.com

   Sami Boutros 
   VMware 
   Email: sboutros@vmware.com

   Uri Elzur 
   Intel
   Email: uri.elzur@intel.com

   Ilango Ganga 
   Intel 
   Email: ilango.s.ganga@intel.com

   Pankaj Garg 
   Microsoft
   Email: pankajg@microsoft.com

   Rajeev Manur 
   Broadcom 
   Email: rajeev.manur@broadcom.com

   Tal Mizrahi 
   Marvell 
   Email: talmi@marvell.com

   David Mozes 
   Mellanox
   Email: davidm@mellanox.com

   Erik Nordmark
   Arista Networks
   Email: nordmark@sonic.net

   Michael Smith 
   Cisco
   Email: michsmit@cisco.com

 


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