Virtual network diagnosis as a service

Abstract

Today’s cloud network platforms allow tenants to con-struct sophisticated virtual network topologies among their VMs on a shared physical network infrastructure. However, these platforms provide little support for ten-ants to diagnose problems in their virtual networks. Network virtualization hides the underlying infrastruc-ture from tenants as well as prevents deploying exist-ing network diagnosis tools. This paper makes a case for providing virtual network diagnosis as a service in the cloud. We identify a set of technical challenges in providing such a service and propose a Virtual Network configuration and query interfaces for cloud tenants to troubleshoot their virtual networks. It controls software switches to collect flow traces, distributes traces stor-age, and executes distributed queries for different ten-ants for network diagnosis. It reduces the data collection and processing overhead by performing local flow cap-ture and on-demand query execution. Our experiments validate VND’s functionality and shows its feasibility in terms of quick service response and acceptable over-head; our simulation proves the VND architecture scales to the size of a real data center network.