Experimental evaluation of SDN-controlled, joint consolidation of policies and virtual machines

Middleboxes (MBs) are ubiquitous in modern data centre (DC) due to their crucial role in implementing network security, management and optimisation. In order to meet network policy's requirement on correct traversal of an ordered sequence of MBs, network administrators rely on static policy based routing or VLAN stitching to steer traffic flows. However, dynamic virtual server migration in virtual environment has greatly challenged such static traffic steering. In this paper, we design and implement Sync, an efficient and synergistic scheme to jointly consolidate network policies and virtual machines (VMs), in a readily deployable Mininet environment. We present the architecture of Sync framework and open source its code. We also extensively evaluate Sync over diverse workload and policies. Our results show that in an emulated DC of 686 servers, 10k VMs, 8k policies, and 100k flows, Sync processes a group of 900 VMs and 10 VMs in 634 seconds and 4 seconds respectively.