Inline V Series

Note:  Inline V Series is now available as an Early Access feature, giving you the opportunity to explore its capabilities before the general availability (GA).

The Inline V Series solution provides an advanced, scalable, agentless traffic acquisition mechanism that integrates seamlessly into your network. By deploying V Series Nodes in inline mode, you can mirror and process traffic efficiently while ensuring the reinjection of production traffic without disruption.

In AWS and Azure environments, the Inline V Series solution leverages Gateway Load Balancers (GWLB) to enable efficient traffic handling and visibility. This feature ensures low-latency performance, making it ideal for continuous traffic inspection and monitoring. Designed for simplicity and operational efficiency, the Inline V Series allows you to gain deep insights into network activity while maintaining high performance in demanding network environments.

This solution can be used for forwarding inline traffic and traffic processing. When traffic reaches the Inline V Series Node, a copy of the packet is taken as out-of-band traffic. The copied traffic can be forwarded to a GigaVUE V Series Node for additional processing or directly to monitoring tools. During boot-up, the Inline V Series Node initializes with the default Inline application. A Monitoring Session is required to tap the inline traffic, create a copy for out-of-band forwarding, and send the traffic to the desired tools.

Deployment Use Cases for Inline V Series Solution

Single Tier Deployment

This deployment model can be used when traffic has to be tapped, filtered, and directly sent to tools without any processing.

Multi-Tier Deployment

This deployment model can be used if you wish to process the traffic using GigaVUE V Series Applications before sending it to the tools. The first tier acquires the traffic and sends it to the GigaVUE V Series Nodes in the second tier, where the processing occurs in the GigaVUE V Series Applications.

Limitation

This solution can be implemented only to tap the North-South traffic.

Architecture of Inline V Series Solution in Azure

Components required for configuring Inline V Series Solution in Azure:

  • Application VNet
  • Appliance VNet
  • Public Load balancer
  • Gateway Load balancer
  • Inline V Series Node

Application VNet consists of multiple workload VMs, Public Load Balancer, Public IP Load Balancer, and Application Server in the Backend pool. The appliance VNet consists of Gateway Load Balancer, Inline V Series Node. Any traffic reaching the Gateway Load Balancer will be routed to the Inline V Series Node.

The below architecture diagram explains how the Inline V Series solution works:

Traffic from the internet to the application server (blue arrows):

  1. The traffic from the internet is sent to the Public Load Balancer configured in Application VNet using an Public IP LB configuration.
  2. This traffic is routed the Gateway Load balancer.
  3. The Gateway Load Balancer in the Appliance VNet forwards the traffic to the Inline V Series Nodes. The following actions are performed in the Inline V Series Node:
    • Once the traffic reaches the Inline V Series Nodes, a copy of the packet is taken as out of band traffic.
    • The Out of Band traffic is forwarded to the GigaVUE V Series Node for further processing or it can be forwarded to the tools.
    • The Inline V Series swaps the IP address and the Mac of the packets, where the source and destination are interchanged. As a result the Inline V Series Node becomes the source and Gateway Load Balancer becomes the destination.

Note:  Packets sent from the Gateway Load Balancer will be VXLAN encapsulated and forwarded to the Inline V Series Nodes.

  1. The inline traffic is sent back to the Gateway Load Balancer.
  2. The Gateway Load Balancer forwards the inline traffic to the application servers in the Application VNet.

Refer to the following sections for more details: