Network working Group L. Dunbar Internet Draft Huawei Intended status: Informational W. Kumari Expires: September 2013 Google Igor Gashinsky Yahoo March 13, 2013 Practices for scaling ARP and ND for large data centers draft-dunbar-armd-arp-nd-scaling-practices-07 Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on September 13, 2013. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC Abstract This draft documents some operational practices that allow ARP/ND to scale in data center environments. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ................................................ 3 2. Terminology ................................................. 4 3. Common DC network Designs.................................... 5 4. Layer 3 to Access Switches................................... 5 5. Layer 2 practices to scale ARP/ND............................ 6 5.1. Practices to alleviate APR/ND burden on L2/L3 boundary routers ..................................................... 6 5.1.1. Communicating with a peer in a different subnet....... 6 5.1.2. L2/L3 boundary router processing of inbound traffic .. 7 5.1.3. Inter subnets communications ......................... 8 5.2. Static ARP/ND entries on switches ...................... 8 5.3. ARP/ND Proxy approaches................................. 9 5.4. Multicast Scaling Issues .............................. 10 6. Practices to scale ARP/ND in Overlay models ................ 10 7. Summary and Recommendations ................................ 11 8. Security Considerations .................................... 11 9. IANA Considerations ........................................ 11 10. Acknowledgements .......................................... 12 11. References ................................................ 12 11.1. Normative References.................................. 12 11.2. Informative References................................ 13 Authors' Addresses ............................................ 13 Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC 1. Introduction This draft documents some operational practices that allow ARP/ND to scale in data center environments. As described in [RFC6820], the increasing trend of rapid workload shifting and server virtualization in modern data centers requires servers to be loaded (or re-loaded) with different VMs or applications at different times. Different VMs residing on one physical server may have different IP addresses, or may even be in different IP subnets. In order to allow a physical server to be loaded with VMs in different subnets, or VMs to be moved to different server racks without IP address re-configuration, the networks need to enable multiple broadcast domains (many VLANs) on the interfaces of L2/L3 boundary routers and ToR switches and allow some subnets to span across multiple router ports. Note: The L2/L3 boundary routers in this draft are capable of forwarding IEEE802.1 Ethernet frames (layer 2) without MAC header change. When subnets span across multiple ports of those routers, they still fall under the category of single link, specifically the multi-access link model recommended by [RFC4903]. They are different from the ''multi-link'' subnets described in [Multi-Link] and RFC4903, which refer to different physical media with the same prefix connected to one router. Within the ''multi-link'' subnet described in RFC4903, layer 2 frames from one port cannot be natively forwarded to another port without a header change. Unfortunately, when the combined number of VMs (or hosts) in all those subnets is large, this can lead to address resolution (i.e. IPv4 ARP and IPv6 ND) scaling issues. There are three major issues associated with ARP/ND address resolution protocols when subnets span across multiple L2/L3 boundary router ports: 1) the ARP/ND messages being flooded to many physical link segments which can reduce bandwidth utilization for user traffic; 2) the ARP/ND processing load impact on the L2/L3 boundary routers; 3) In IPv4, every end station in a subnet receives ARP broadcast messages from all other end stations in the subnet. IPv6 ND has eliminated this issue by using multicast. Since the majority of data center servers are moving towards 1G or 10G ports, the bandwidth taken by ARP/ND messages, even when flooded to all physical links, becomes negligible compared to the Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC link bandwidth. In addition, the IGMP/MLD snooping [RFC4541] can further reduce the ND multicast traffic to some physical link segments. As modern servers' computing power increases, the processing taken by a large amount of ARP broadcast messages becomes less significant to servers. For example, lab testing shows that 2000 ARP/s only takes 2% of a single core CPU server. Therefore, the impact of ARP broadcast impact to end stations is not significant on today's servers. Statistics done by Merit Network [ARMD-Statistics] have shown that the major impact of a large number of mobile VMs in Data Center is on the L2/L3 boundary routers, i.e. the issue #2 above. This draft documents some simple practices which can scale ARP/ND in a data center environment, especially in reducing processing load to L2/L3 boundary routers. 2. Terminology This document reuses much of terminology from [RFC6820]. Many of the definitions are presented here to aid the reader. ARP: IPv4 Address Resolution Protocol [RFC826] Aggregation Switch: A Layer 2 switch interconnecting ToR switches Bridge: IEEE802.1Q compliant device. In this draft, Bridge is used interchangeably with Layer 2 switch. DC: Data Center DA: Destination Address End Station: VM or physical server, whose address is either the destination or the source of a data frame. EOR: End of Row switches in data center. NA: IPv6's Neighbor Advertisement ND: IPv6's Neighbor Discovery [RFC4861] NS: IPv6's Neighbor Solicitation Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC SA: Source Address ToR: Top of Rack Switch (also known as access switch). UNA: IPv6's Unsolicited Neighbor Advertisement VM: Virtual Machines Subnet Refer to the Multi-access link subnet referenced by RFC4903 3. Common DC network Designs Some common network designs for a data center include: 1) Layer 3 connectivity to the access switch, 2) Large Layer 2, and 3) Overlay models. There is no single network design that fits all cases. The following sections document some of the common practices to scale Address Resolution under each network design. 4. Layer 3 to Access Switches This network design configures Layer 3 to the access switches; effectively making the access switches the L2/L3 boundary routers for the attached VMs. As described in [RFC6820], many data centers are architected so that ARP/ND broadcast/multicast messages are confined to a few ports (interfaces) of the access switches (i.e. ToR switches). Another variant of the Layer 3 solution is Layer 3 infrastructure configured all the way to servers (or even to the VMs), which confines the ARP/ND broadcast/multicast messages to the small number of VMs within the server. Advantage: Both ARP and ND scale well. There is no address resolution issue in this design. Disadvantage: The main disadvantage to this network design occurs during VM movement. During VM movement, either VMs need an address Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC change or switches/routers need a configuration change when the VMs are moved to different locations. Summary: This solution is more suitable to data centers which have a static workload and/or network operators who can re-configure IP addresses/subnets on switches before any workload change. No protocol changes are suggested. 5. Layer 2 practices to scale ARP/ND 5.1. Practices to alleviate APR/ND burden on L2/L3 boundary routers The ARP/ND broadcast/multicast messages in a Layer 2 domain can negatively affect the L2/L3 boundary routers, especially with a large number of VMs and subnets. This section describes some commonly used practices in reducing the ARP/ND processing required on L2/L3 boundary routers. 5.1.1. Communicating with a peer in a different subnet Scenario: When the originating end station doesn't have its default gateway MAC address in its ARP/ND cache and needs to communicate with a peer in a different subnet, it needs to send ARP/ND requests to its default gateway router to resolve the router's MAC address. If there are many subnets on the gateway router and a large number of end stations in those subnets that don't have gateway MAC in their ARP/ND caches, the gateway router has to process a very large number of ARP/ND requests. This is often CPU intensive as ARP/ND messages are usually processed by the CPU (and not in hardware). Note: Any centralized configuration which pre-loads the default MAC addresses is not included in this scenario. Solution: For IPv4 networks, a practice to alleviate this problem is to have the L2/L3 boundary router send periodic gratuitous ARP [GratuitousARP] messages, so that all the connected end stations can refresh their ARP caches. As a result, most (if not all) end stations will not need to send ARP requests for the gateway routers when they need to communicate with external peers. For the above scenario, IPv6 end stations are still required to send unicast ND messages to their default gateway router (even with those routers periodically sending Unsolicited Neighbor Advertisements) because IPv6 requires bi-directional path validation. Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC Advantage: Reduction of ARP requests to be processed by L2/L3 boundary router for IPv4. Disadvantage: this practice doesn't reduce ND processing on L2/L3 boundary router for IPv6 traffic. Recommendation: Use in IPv4-only networks, or make change to the ND protocol to reduce the impact of bi-directional frame validation. Some work in progress in this area is described in [Impatient-NUD]. Note: The ND and SEND [RFC3971] use the bi-directional nature of queries to detect and prevent security attacks. 5.1.2. L2/L3 boundary router processing of inbound traffic Scenario: When a L2/L3 boundary router receives a data frame destined for a local subnet and the destination is not in the router's ARP/ND cache, some routers hold the packet and trigger an ARP/ND request to resolve the L2 address. The router may need to send multiple ARP/ND requests until either a timeout is reached or an ARP/ND reply is received before forwarding the data packets towards the target's MAC address. This process is not only CPU intensive but also buffer intensive. Solution: To protect a router from being overburdened by resolving target MAC addresses, one solution is for the router to limit the rate of resolving target MAC addresses for inbound traffic whose target is not in the router's ARP/ND cache. When the rate is exceeded, the incoming traffic whose target is not in the ARP/ND cache is dropped. For an IPv4 network, another common practice to alleviate pain caused by this problem is for the router to snoop ARP messages between other hosts, so that its ARP cache can be refreshed with active addresses in the L2 domain. As a result, there is an increased likelihood of the router's ARP cache having the IP-MAC entry when it receives data frames from external peers. [RFC6820] section 7.1 provides a full description of this problem. For IPv6 end stations, routers are supposed to send RA unicast even if they have snooped UNA/NS/NA from those stations. Therefore, this practice allows an L2/L3 boundary to send unicast RA to target instead of multicast. [RFC6820] section 7.2 has a full description of this problem. Advantage: Reduction of the number of ARP requests that routers have to send upon receiving IPv4 packets and the number of IPv4 Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 7] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC data frames from external peers that routers have to hold due to targets not in ARP cache. Disadvantage: For IPv6 traffic, the amount of ND processing on routers for IPv6 traffic is not reduced. IPv4 routers still need to hold data packets from external peers and trigger ARP requests if the targets of the data packets either don't exist or are not very active. In this case, IPv4 process or IPv4 buffers are not reduced. Recommendation: If there is a higher chance of routers receiving data packets that are destined for non-existing or inactive targets, alternative approaches should be considered. 5.1.3. Inter subnets communications The router could be hit with ARP/ND twice when the originating and destination stations are in different subnets attached to the same router and those hosts don't communicate with external peers often enough. The first hit is when the originating station in subnet-A initiates an ARP/ND request to the L2/L3 boundary router if the router's MAC is not in the host's cache (5.1.1 above); and the second hit is when the L2/L3 boundary router initiates ARP/ND requests to the target in subnet-B if the target is not in router's ARP/ND cache (5.1.2 above). Again, practices described in 5.1.1 and 5.1.2 can alleviate some problems in some IPv4 networks. For IPv6 traffic, the practices don't reduce the ND processing on L2/L3 boundary routers. Recommendation: Consider the recommended approaches described in 5.1.1 & 5.1.2. However, any solutions that relax the bi-directional requirement of IPv6 ND disable the security the two-way ND communication exchange provides. 5.2. Static ARP/ND entries on switches In a datacenter environment the placement of L2 and L3 addressing may be orchestrated by Server (or VM) Management System(s). Therefore it may be possible for static ARP/ND entries to be configured on routers and / or servers. Advantage: This methodology has been used to reduce ARP/ND fluctuations in large scale data center networks. Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 8] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC Disadvantage: When some VMs are added, deleted, or moved, many switches' static entries need to be updated. In a Data Center with virtualized servers, those events can happen frequently. For example, for an event of one VM being added to one server, if the subnet of this VM spans across 15 access switches, all of them need to be updated. Network management (SNMP, netconf, or proprietary) mechanisms are available to provide updates or incremental updates. However, there is no well defined approach for switches to synchronize their content with the management system for efficient incremental update. Recommendation: Additional work may be needed within IETF (e.g. netconf, NVo3, IR2S, etc.) to get prompt incremental updates of static ARP/ND entries when changes occur. 5.3. ARP/ND Proxy approaches RFC1027 [RFC1027] specifies one ARP proxy approach. However, RFC1027 is not a scaling mechanism. Since the publication of RFC1027 in 1987 many variants of ARP proxy have been deployed. RFC1027's ARP Proxy is for a gateway to return its own MAC address on behalf of the target station. [ARP_Reduction] describes a type of ''ARP Proxy'' which is for a ToR switch to snoop ARP requests and return the target station's MAC if the ToR has the information in its cache. However, [RFC4903] doesn't recommend the caching approach described in [ARP_Reduction] because such a cache prevents any type of fast mobility between layer 2 ports, and breaks Secure neighbor Discovery [RFC3971]. IPv6 ND Proxy [RFC4389] specifies a proxy used between Ethernet segment and other segments, such as wireless or PPP segments. ND Proxy [RFC4389] doesn't allow a proxy to send NA on behalf of the target to ensure that the proxy does not interfere with hosts moving from one segment to another. Therefore, the ND Proxy [RFC4389] doesn't reduce the number of ND messages to L2/L3 boundary router. Bottom line, the term ''ARP/ND Proxy'' has different interpretations depending on vendors and/or environments. Recommendation: For IPv4, even though those Proxy ARP variants (not RFC1023) have been used to reduce ARP traffic in various environments, there are many issues with caching. IETF should consider making proxy recommendations for Data Center environment as a transition issue to help DC operators transitioning to IPv6. The ''Guideline for proxy developers'' Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 9] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC [RFC4389] should be considered when develop any new proxy protocols to scale ARP. 5.4. Multicast Scaling Issues Multicast snooping (IGMP/MLD) has different implementations and scaling issues. [RFC4541] notes that multicast IGMPv2/v3 snooping has trouble with subnets that include IGMPv2 and IGMPv3. [RFC4541] also notes that MLDv2 snooping requires use of either DMAC address filtering or deeper inspection of frames/packet to allow for scaling. MLDv2 snooping needs to be re-examined for scaling within the DC. Efforts such as IGMP/MLD explicit tracking [IGMP-MLD-tracking] for downstream host need to provide better scaling than IGMP/MLDv2 snooping. 6. Practices to scale ARP/ND in Overlay models There are several drafts on using overlay networks to scale large layer 2 networks (or avoid the need for large L2 networks) and enable mobility (e.g. draft-wkumari-dcops-l3-vmmobility-00, draft- mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan-00). TRILL and IEEE802.1ah (Mac-in-Mac) are other types of overlay network to scale Layer 2. Overlay networks hide the VMs' addresses from the interior switches and routers, thereby greatly reduces the number of addresses exposed to the interior switches and router. The Overlay Edge nodes that perform the network address encapsulation/decapsulation still handle all remote stations addresses that communicate with the locally attached end stations. For a large data center with many applications, these applications' IP addresses need to be reachable by external peers. Therefore, the overlay network may have a bottleneck at the Gateway node(s) in processing resolving target stations' physical address (MAC or IP) and the overlay edge address within the data center. Here are some approaches that can be used to minimize the problem: 1. Use static mapping as described in Section 5.2. 2. Have multiple L2/L3 boundary nodes (i.e. routers), with each handling a subset of stations addresses which are visible to external peers (e.g. Gateway #1 handles a set of prefixes, Gateway #2 handles another subset of prefixes, etc.). Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 10] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC 7. Summary and Recommendations This memo describes some common practices which can alleviate the impact of address resolution on L2/L3 gateway routers. In Data Centers, no single solution fits all deployments. This memo has summarized some practices in various scenarios and the advantages and disadvantages about all of these practices. In some of these scenarios, the common practices could be improved by creating and/or extending existing IETF protocols. These protocol change recommendations are: - Relax some bi-directional requirement of IPv6 ND in some environment. However, other issues will be introduced when the bi-directional requirement of ND is relaxed. Therefore, it is necessary to have comprehensive study in making those changes. - Create an incremental ''update'' schemes for efficient static ARP/ND entries. - Develop IPv4 ARP/IPv6 ND Proxy standards for use in the data center. The ''Guideline for proxy developers'' [RFC4389] should be considered when develop any new proxy protocols to scale ARP/ND. - Consider scaling issues with IGMP/MLD snooping to determine if new alternatives can provide better scaling. 8. Security Considerations This draft documents existing solutions and proposes additional work that could be initiated to extend various IETF protocols to better scale ARP/ND for the data center environment. The security is a major issue for data center environment. Therefore, security should be seriously considered when developing any future protocol extension. 9. IANA Considerations This document does not request any action from IANA. Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 11] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC 10. Acknowledgements We want to acknowledge ARMD WG and the following people for their valuable inputs to this draft: Joel Jaeggli, Dave Thaler, Susan Hares, Benson Schliesser, T. Sridhar, Ron Bonica, Kireeti Kompella, and K.K.Ramakrishnan. 11. References 11.1. Normative References [GratuitousARP] S. Cheshire, ''IPv4 Address Conflict Detection'', RFC 5227, July 2008. [IGMP-MLD-tracking] H. Aseda, and N. Leymann, ''IGMP/MLD-Based Explicit Membership Tracking Function for Multicast Routers'' (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-pim- explicit-tracking-02), Oct, 2012. [RFC826] D.C. Plummer, ''An Ethernet address resolution protocol.'' RFC826, Nov 1982. [RFC1027] Mitchell, et al, ''Using ARP to Implement Transparent Subnet Gateways'' (http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1027/) [RFC3971] Arkko, et al, ''Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND)'', RFC3971, March 2005 [RFC4389] Thaler, et al, ''Neighbor Discovery Proxies (ND Proxy)'', RFC4389, April 2006 [RFC4541] Christensen, et al, ''Considerations for Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) and Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) Snooping Switches'', RFC 4541, May 2006 [RFC4861] Narten, et al, ''Neighbor Discovery for IP version 6 (IPv6)'', RFC4861, Sept 2007 [RFC4903] Thaler, ''Multilink Subnet Issues'', RFC4903, July 2007 [RFC6820] Narten, et al, ''Address Resolution Problems in Large Data Center Networks'', RFC6820, Jan 2013 Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 12] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC 11.2. Informative References [Impatient-NUD] E. Nordmark, I. Gashinsky, ''draft-ietf-6man- impatient-nud'' [ARMD-Statistics] M. Karir, J. Rees, ''Address Resolution Statistics'', draft-karir-armd-statistics-01.txt (expired), July 2011. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-karir-armd- statistics/ [ARP_Reduction] Shah, et al, ''ARP Broadcast Reduction for Large Data Centers'', draft-shah-armd-arp-reduction-02.txt (expired), Oct 2011. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-shah-armd-arp- reduction/ [Multi-Link] Thaler, et al, ''Multi-link Subnet Support in IPv6'', draft-ietf-ipv6-multilink-subnets-00.txt (expired), Dec 2002. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ipv6- multilink-subnets/ Authors' Addresses Linda Dunbar Huawei Technologies 5340 Legacy Drive, Suite 175 Plano, TX 75024, USA Phone: (469) 277 5840 Email: ldunbar@huawei.com Warren Kumari Google 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 US Email: warren@kumari.net Igor Gashinsky Yahoo 45 West 18th Street 6th floor New York, NY 10011 Email: igor@yahoo-inc.com Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 13] Internet-Draft Practices to scale ARP/ND in large DC Dunbar-Kumari-Gashinsky Expires September 13, 2013 [Page 14]