Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet

Tunneling and virtualization technology for computer networks

OSI model by layer
7. Application layer NNTP SIP SSI DNS FTP Gopher HTTP (HTTP/3) NFS NTP SMPP SSH SMTP SNMP Telnet DHCP NETCONF more....
6. Presentation layer MIME XDR ASN.1 ASCII TLS PGP
5. Session layer Named pipe NetBIOS SAP PPTP RTP SOCKS X.225
4. Transport layer TCP UDP SCTP DCCP QUIC SPX
3. Network layer IP IPv4 IPv6 ICMP (ICMPv6) IPsec IGMP IPX IS-IS AppleTalk X.25 PLP
2. Data link layer ATM ARP SDLC HDLC CSLIP SLIP GFP PLIP IEEE 802.2 LLC MAC L2TP IEEE 802.3 Frame Relay ITU-T G.hn DLL PPP X.25 LAPB Q.922 LAPF IEEE 802.11
1. Physical layer RS-232 RS-449 ITU-T V-Series I.430 I.431 PDH SONET/SDH PON OTN DSL IEEE 802.3 IEEE 802.11 IEEE 802.15 IEEE 802.16 IEEE 1394 ITU-T G.hn PHY USB Bluetooth
v t e

Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) is a tunneling and virtualization technology for computer networks, created and backed by IBM. DOVE allows creation of network virtualization layers for deploying, controlling, and managing multiple independent and isolated network applications over a shared physical network infrastructure.

Overview

The tunneling format is decoupled from the logical network view offered by DOVE, and defines only the way frames are encapsulated to be transferred by the underlying network infrastructure. As a notable difference from other network virtualization solutions (such as OTV), this allows DOVE not to be limited to providing OSI layer 2 emulation only (for example, passing Ethernet frames).

Logical components of the DOVE architecture are DOVE controllers and DOVE switches (abbreviated as dSwitch). DOVE controllers perform management functions, and one part of the control plane functions across DOVE switches. DOVE switches perform the encapsulation of layer 2 frames into UDP packets using the Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) frame format, and provide virtual interfaces for virtual machines to plug into, similarly to how physical Ethernet switches provide ports for network interface controller (NIC) connections. DOVE switches are running as part of virtual machine hypervisors.

Advantages

Primary advantages of DOVE include the following:

No dependency on the underlying physical network and protocols
Use of the existing IP network infrastructure
No addresses of virtual machines are present in Ethernet switches, resulting in smaller MAC tables and less complex STP layouts
No limitations related to the Virtual LAN (VLAN) technology, resulting in more than 16 million possible separate networks, compared to the VLAN's limit of 4,000
No dependency on the IP multicast traffic

Implementations

As of November 2013, DOVE components are implemented as part of VMware's hypervisors, while implementations for the Linux KVM and Open vSwitch are planned.

DOVE extensions for VXLAN were merged into the Linux kernel mainline in kernel version 3.8, which was released on February 18, 2013. Appropriate extensions to related userspace configuration utilities were added into version 3.8.0 of the iproute2 utilities, which was released on February 21, 2013.

References

"X.225 : Information technology – Open Systems Interconnection – Connection-oriented Session protocol: Protocol specification". Archived from the original on February 1, 2021. Retrieved March 10, 2023.
^ Liane Lewin-Eytan; Katherine Barabash; Rami Cohen; Vinit Jain; Anna Levin (August 28, 2011). "Designing Modular Overlay Solutions for Network Virtualization" (PDF). IBM Research Division. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
Renato Recio (2012). "Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) Networks" (PDF). IBM. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
Shamus McGillicuddy (September 2012). "IBM DOVE: Big Blue enters the network virtualization battleground". techtarget.com. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
Thomas Richter (October 21, 2013). "Software Defined Networking using VXLAN" (PDF). LinuxCon Edinburgh. IBM Research and Development, Linux Technology Center. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
Jack Clark (March 27, 2013). "IBM unfurls SDN network manager". The Register. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
"Open DOVE project proposal" (PDF). IBM System Networking. 2013. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
"Linux kernel 3.8, Section 10. Networking". kernelnewbies.org. February 18, 2013. Retrieved July 14, 2014.
"kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git: Add DOVE extensions for VXLAN". Linux kernel source tree. kernel.org. November 20, 2012. Retrieved November 23, 2013.
Stephen Hemminger (February 21, 2013). "iproute2 3.8.0". LWN.net. Retrieved November 23, 2013.

External links

IBM DOVE Takes Flight with New SDN Overlay, Fixes VXLAN Scaling Issues, March 26, 2013, by Roy Chua
Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) integration with OpenStack, IEEE, May 2013, by Rami Cohen, Katherine Barabash and Liran Schour
Building an Open, Adaptive and Responsive Data Center using OpenDaylight, OpenDaylight summit, February 4, 2014, by Vijoy Pandey
Software Defined Network, IBM revelation day, November 6, 2013, by Igor Marty

Virtualization software

Comparison of platform virtualization software

Hardware
(hypervisors)

Native

Hosted

Specialized	Basilisk II Bochs Cooperative Linux DOSBox DOSEMU PCem 86Box PikeOS SheepShaver SIMH Windows on Windows Virtual DOS machine Win4Lin
Independent	bhyve Microsoft Virtual Server Parallels Workstation (Extreme) Parallels Desktop for Mac Parallels Server for Mac PearPC QEMU VirtualBox Virtual Iron Virtual PC VMware Fusion VMware Server VMware Workstation (Player)

Tools

Operating
system

OS containers	FreeBSD jail iCore Virtual Accounts Linux-VServer Linux Containers OpenVZ Solaris Containers Virtuozzo Workload Partitions
Application containers	Docker Podman lmctfy rkt
Virtual kernel architectures	Rump kernel User-mode Linux vkernel
Related kernel features	BrandZ cgroups chroot namespaces eBPF seccomp
Orchestration	Amazon ECS Kubernetes OpenShift

Desktop

Application

Network

Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE)
Ethernet VPN (EVPN)
NVGRE
Open vSwitch
Virtual security switch
Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN)
Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE)

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