VIRTUALIZED SERVICES PLATFORM

Virtualized Cloud Services for SDN automation 

in the datacenter
THE NUAGE NETWORKS APPROACH: Nuage Networks™ Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) is a comprehensive solution
NETWORK CHOREOGRAPHY that makes the network as readily consumable as compute resources across the
Nuage Networks VCS allows enterprise datacenter, enterprise WAN and public cloud providers. It does this by providing the
administrators to outline their networking missing link to ensure rapid and efficient delivery of highly customizable application
requirements in application terms, services, in and across multi-tenanted datacenters. Nuage Networks Virtualized
without being burdened by network Cloud Services (VCS) is the SDN platform for private cloud network automation in
implementation details.
the enterprise datacenter. It enables the deployment of massively scalable cloud-
Administrators can express security based services with the agility and performance demanded by dynamic application
(firewall and ACL policies), load balancing environments.
and user access-right policies with
What is Nuage Networks VCS?
domain and zone abstractions, instead of
Nuage Networks VCS is a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution that
having to use tedious and error-prone IP
address assignments. Such policies are virtualizes any DC network infrastructure and automatically establishes connectivity
subsequently used to dynamically govern between compute resources upon their creation. Leveraging programmable
network behavior on an as-needed basis, business logic and a powerful policy engine, VCS provides an open and highly
triggered by compute instance creation, responsive solution that scales to meet the stringent needs of massive multi-tenant
migration or deletion.  DCs. VCS is a software solution that can be deployed over existing datacenter
network fabrics and to public cloud providers.
By using an event-driven model with
a policy pull approach, VCS reserves
network resources as they are required, FIGURE 1. The Nuage Networks VSP Approach
avoiding the need to maintain network
topology details. This ensures that the
demands of cloud-based applications and
Service Definition
Cloud
Apps

& Design
services can be met across thousands of
A B C D E ... (User/App Driven)
users in an efficient and timely manner.
VCS also provides service insight by
collecting and storing statistics on a 
SDN Abstration

per-tenant and per-VM/Container  Business Logic

virtual port basis.
Layer

Policy

Topology
Resources

Network Service
Network

Instantiation
(Trigger-Driven)
Slice n
 Cloud deployment of complex applications requires more than simple L2 connectivity.
To meet these needs, VCS deploys the full range of L2-L4 networking services on a per-
tenant or per-application basis using overlay technologies. This ensures each application
gets the services required, and is not forced into a basic L2 VLAN connectivity.

Unlike other solutions that are restricted to the administrative domain of a single
datacenter, VCS enables seamless interoperability across administrative domains and
with existing VPN services. It does this by leveraging the power of mature MP-BGP
technologies.

Nuage Networks significantly improves server utilization by allowing virtual machines

(VMs), Docker containers and bare metal workloads to be freely placed wherever
compute resources are available, within or across datacenters.

Product components
The Nuage Networks
Virtualized Services Directory – The Virtualized Services Directory (VSD)
Solution in 7 points
is a programmable policy and analytics engine. It provides a flexible and
The Nuage Networks VSP/VCS hierarchical network policy framework that enables IT administrators to
solution: define and enforce resource policies in a user-friendly manner.
■■ Provides support for all major
cloud management systems, VSD contains a multi-tenanted service directory that supports role-based
hypervisors, and network gear. administration of users, compute and network resources. It also manages network
VCS leverages VMs on any resource assignments such as IP and MAC addresses.
x86-based hardware.
For service assurance, VSD allows the definition of sophisticated statistics rules such
■■ Provides SDN-enabled as collection frequencies, rolling averages and samples, as well as Threshold Crossing
virtualization with support
Alerts (TCAs). When a TCA occurs, it will trigger an event that can be exported to external
of L2-L4 services
systems through a generic messaging bus. Statistics are aggregated over hours, days
■■ Optimizes and scales datacenter and months and stored to facilitate data mining and performance reporting.
connectivity and is deployable
on heterogeneous networks VSD can be deployed as a stand-alone or clustered solution depending on scaling needs.
■■ Uses programmable business
Virtualized Services Controller – The Virtualized Services Controller (VSC)
logic and policies to fully
is the industry’s most powerful and scalable SDN controller. It functions
automate network service
as the robust network control plane for datacenters, maintaining a full
creation
view of per-tenant network and service topologies. Through VSC, virtual routing and
■■ Offers unrestricted placement switching constructs are established to program the network forwarding plane using
of VM, container or bare metal the OpenFlow™ protocol. Multiple VSC instances can be federated within and across
workloads to maximize efficiency
datacenters by leveraging MP-BGP — a proven and highly scalable network technology.
of server resources 
■■ Integrates public, private and Virtual Routing and Switching – The Virtual Routing and Switching
hybrid cloud applications into (VRS) component is an enhanced Open vSwitch (OVS) implementation
managed VPNs that constitutes the network forwarding plane. It encapsulates and de-
encapsulates user traffic, enforcing L2-L4 traffic policies as defined by VSD. VRS tracks
■■ Includes extensive data analytics
and performance monitoring VM creation, migration and deletion events to dynamically adjust network connectivity.
capabilities VRS supports multiple hypervisors and container-ready platforms in virtualized server
environments. It also operates as a gateway for bare metal servers or service appliances.
VCS also includes a physical network appliance, the Nuage Networks 7850 Virtual
Services Gateway (VSG) that serve as overlay network tunnel endpoints where needed,
such as for integration with physical servers, as well as working with leading networking
vendors’ top-of-rack switches for VXLAN termination. To support bare metal applications,
a software VRS-B (bare metal) may also be deployed directly on the physical server,
avoiding the need for VXLAN-compliant top-of-rack switch.

NUAGE NETWORKS VIRTUALIZED SERVICES PLATFORM DATA SHEET 2

FIGURE 2. Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform Architecture

VMware vCenter Develpment environments

Core

CM Plugin
OpenStack Customer applications
IP Network SCVMM REST APIs Dashboards
DC Edge Network monitors
Routers

Virtualized Services Directory (VSD)

IP Policy Management and Analytics

DC Network
MP-BGP
Virtualized Services Controller (VSC)
Network Control Plane

VM BM ToR VG
Virtual Routing and Switching (VRS)
Server Racks

Network Forwarding Plane

• VM: VMware ESXi, Linux KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V
• Bare Metal: VRS-B (installed directly) and Nuage Networks 7850 VSG
• Containers: Docker libnetwork, Kubernetes and Mesos CNI plugins

Physical view Logical view

NUAGE NETWORKS VIRTUALIZED SERVICES PLATFORM DATA SHEET 3

Technical specifications
REQUIREMENT SUPPORT
Cloud Platforms ■■ VMware® vCenter 5.5 and later
VCIN security enhancements
■■ Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
■■ OpenStackTM
Supports all major vendor distributions
Full ML2 support
Ocata support
Newton Monolithic plugin support
Neutron project: Plug-in supported for open source OpenStack and all vendor
distributions
VLAN-aware Virtual Machines
Hypervisors and Container Platforms ■■ KVM, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Docker, OpenShift, Kubernetes and Mesos
■■ Kubernetes High-Availability support
■■ Container Networking Interface (CNI) support on Kubernetes
Routing/Switching Hardware and Software Any IP-capable device for datacenter networking (e.g., Arista, Cisco, HPE, and others)

Firewalls, Load Balancers, Open ecosystem support through a CMS-programmable framework

and DNS/DHCP Servers (e.g., OpenStack, FWaaS, LBaaS)
Linux Compatible and tested with distributions from Red Hat, Ubuntu, and CentOS
OSS/BSS app integration Northbound API access through RESTful APIs and HTML5-based web portal
for user self-service
Support for Non-Virtualized (Bare Metal) ■■ Industry-first Layer 3 bare metal gateway support with the Nuage Networks
Components 7850 VSG. Enables non-virtualized components to be managed along with
virtualized components.
■■ VRS-B virtual switch may also be deployed directly on the bare metal server.
Security In addition to standard network security, subset of additional functionality: 
■■ Secure Microsegmentation

■■ Access Control List (ACL) configuration

■■ Access security includes a distributed policy-based L2-L4 firewall 

■■ Port Mirroring

■■ OpenStack XaaS integration

■■ VLAN Trunking

VPN integration Seamless integration based on MP-BGP with use of standard BGP functionality
Network virtualization ■■ NVO3 framework for DC Network Virtualization with L2/3 NVE support
■■ IPv6 overlays
Architecture scalability Federated SDN control architecture based on MP-BGP
Analytics engine Fully programmable and extensible engine based on Hadoop clusters with real-time
analytics support

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Document code: SR1901032055EN (January) CID165442