Architecture of GigaVUE Cloud Suite for OpenStack

GigaVUE Cloud Suite for OpenStack captures traffic in OpenStack cloud using G-vTAP Agents directly or through the hypervisor as described in this section.

Refer to the following architectures for details:

■   G-vTAP Agent
■   Open vSwitch (OVS) Mirroring

G-vTAP Agent

A G-vTAP Agent is a tiny footprint user-space agent (G-vTAP) that is deployed in a project instance. This agent mirrors the traffic from a source interface to a destination mirror interface. The mirrored traffic is then sent to the GigaVUE® V Series node. The following figure shows a high-level architecture of GigaVUE Cloud Suite for OpenStack using G-vTAP Agents as the source for acquiring the traffic.

A G-vTAP Agent is deployed by installing the agent in the virtual instances. When a G-vTAP Agent is installed, a G-vTAP Controller must be configured in your environment. A G-vTAP Controller orchestrates the flow of mirrored traffic from G-vTAP Agents to the GigaVUE V Series nodes. A single G-vTAP Controller can manage up to 100 G-vTAP Agents deployed in the cloud.

By using G-vTAP Agents for mirroring traffic, the monitoring infrastructure is fully contained within the virtual machine being monitored. This agent is agnostic of the underlying virtual switch. Also, the cost of monitoring a virtual machine is borne by the same virtual machine.

Open vSwitch (OVS) Mirroring

When deploying Open vSwitch (OVS) Mirroring, a G-vTAP Agent is installed on the hypervisor where the VMs you wish to monitor are located. When a G-vTAP Agent is installed, a G-vTAP Controller must be configured in your environment. A G-vTAP Controller orchestrates the flow of mirrored traffic from G-vTAP Agents to the GigaVUE V Series nodes.

A single G-vTAP Controller can manage up to 100 G-vTAP Agents deployed in the cloud. By using OVS Mirroring or OVS Mirroring + DPDK, or , the mirroring infrastructure is fully contained within the hypervisors.

Note:  GigaVUE Cloud Suite for OpenStack supports both the access ports and the VLAN trunk ports for OVS traffic mirroring. To override the default values of OVS mirror tunnel ID range, refer to Configure the OpenStack Settings.

The G-vTAP Agents are deployed on the target hypervisors and the configuration file is to be modified based on the requirements and service. GigaVUE-FM connects to G-vTAP Controller and each G-vTAP Controller can talk to G-vTAP Agents. GigaVUE-FM identifies the interfaces to be monitored from the monitoring session details. GigaVUE-FM mirrors and forwards the traffic to the GigaVUE V Series nodes based on the deployed Monitoring Session.

  • G-vTAP configures traffic mirroring in the OVS (with or without DPDK) and the management of the mirrored traffic is completely based on OVS architecture and the server.
  • OVS Mirroring also supports Open vSwitch with DPDK and
  • The configuration steps for OVS Mirroring, OVS Mirroring with DPDK are the same.

Refer Deploying Gigamon CloudSuite on OpenStack to scale-inand Open vSwitch with Hardware offload and scale-out monitoring tools for more detailed information.