| Fibre Channel over Ethernet(FCoE) is an I/O integration technology, consolidating traditional local area network(LAN) and storage area network(SAN), reducing hardware and energy costs, and becoming a key technology for future data centers. FCoE adopts data center Bridge(DCB) technology to achieve lossless transmission characteristics. In order to reduce the total cost of ownership, as well as use and control on-demand information and communication technology(ICT) resources, data center has been actively promoting the application of network virtualization and software-defined networks. Existing SDN methods such as OpenFlow can not control the storage flow, and the study of SDN applied in a virtualized environment is rare.Based on the problems above, a software-defined FCoE systems was proposed, which controls FCoE flow in virtualized environment in a software-defined way. The system transfers FCoE flow via a multi-level I/O path from the application layer of virtual machine to the target storage device, provides a common method of FCoE login, and possesses a centralized control plane. The control plane can choose to turn on or off FCoE protocol processing capabilities, resolve the FCoE Initialization Protocol(FIP) packets, control FCoE traffic routing in virtual switch(vswitch), and guarantee network bandwidth resources for FCoE flow. Based on paravirtualization of Xen and virtual switches openvswitch, we implement a software-defined FCoE platform prototype.We conduct test and evaluation on the aboved prototype. Experimental results show that the software-defined FCoE system enables ordinary Gigabit Ethernet card to log in FCoE network with a general method. Vswitch controller is capable of resolving FIP packets and controlling the flow forwarding. The occupancy ratio of FCoE flow in network can be controlled to provide a configurable bandwidth guarantee. |
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