Deploying V Series 2 visibility solution for OpenStack (5.11)

Introduction

Enterprises are adopting Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) to leverage the benefits of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The main challenge in SDDC is gaining visibility on the traffic flowing between virtualized workloads, especially the traffic between workloads that reside on the same physical server to ensure that the same security controls are deployed across both physical and virtual workloads. Gigamon's Visibility Platform for OpenStack provides visibility and also leverages the existing security tool stack which saves cost, reduces complexity, and administrative overhead. Gigamon's solution supports VM-based and Hypervisor-based deployments. This Gigamon Validated Design illustrates the deployment of the VM-based solution.

Design Overview

GigaVUE Cloud Suite for OpenStack delivers intelligent network traffic visibility for the workloads running in a private cloud based on OpenStack and enables increased security, operational efficiency, and scales across virtual private clouds (VPCs). With this solution, you can:

• Gain a single view for all network traffic and expedite network-based tool deployments and upgrades.
• Use GigaSMART® Traffic and Subscriber Intelligence to deliver optimized correlated traffic to the required tools with up to 90 percent reduction in traffic.
• Increase your current tool stack’s ROI by streamlining the traffic sent to each tool, based on the type and capacity on which the traffic is designed. 

The solution consists of three key components (as shown in Figure 1):

• Traffic acquisition using VM-based G-vTAP agents.
• Traffic brokering (aggregation, intelligence, and distribution) using GigaVUE V Series nodes.
• Centralized orchestration and management using GigaVUE-FM.

Figure 1: GigaVUE Cloud Suite for OpenStack powered clouds

GigaVUE Cloud Suite Components

The following design illustrates the orchestration of components to enable Gigamon's visibility on OpenStack clouds.

Figure 2: Logical topology of GigaVUE cloud components for OpenStack using G-vTAPs

• GigaVUE-FM -The Gigamon Fabric Manager provides centralized orchestration and management across the entire network infrastructure including OpenStack, VMware, and public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The traffic policies can be configured using a simple drag-and-drop user interface.

• G-vTAP Controller and GigaVUE V Series Controller - For flexible deployment models, such as hybrid and multi-project deployments at scale, GigaVUE Cloud Suite leverages a controller-based architecture to proxy the command-and-control APIs while preserving existing Network Address Translation (NAT) or IP addressing schemes. The G-vTAP controller and GigaVUE V Series controllers are used to proxy commands from GigaVUE-FM to the G-vTAP agents and GigaVUE V Series nodes respectively.

  For V Series 2 solution, the V Series Controller is optional. Customer can skip deploying V Series controller if not needed.

  For this Gigamon Validated Design, we skipped V Series Proxy deployment by selecting No.

  

• G-vTAP Agent - A lightweight agent deployed in an OpenStack VM instance. The agent mirrors traffic from the production instance and sends the mirrored traffic via L2GRE/IPsec to GigaVUE H or GigaVUE V Series nodes.
• GigaVUE V Series Node- The Visibility nodes deployed in OpenStack to selectively aggregate, optimize, replicate, and distribute the traffic of interest to multiple tools located anywhere.