Virtual Network Diagnosis as a Service
Abstract
Today’s cloud network platforms allow tenants to construct sophisticated virtual network topologies among
their VMs on a shared physical network infrastructure.
However, these platforms provide little support for tenants to diagnose problems in their virtual networks.
Network virtualization hides the underlying infrastructure from tenants as well as prevents deploying existing 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
Diagnosis (VND) framework. VND exposes abstract
configuration and query interfaces for cloud tenants to
troubleshoot their virtual networks. It controls software
switches to collect flow traces, distributes traces storage, and executes distributed queries for different tenants for network diagnosis. It reduces the data collection
and processing overhead by performing local flow capture and on-demand query execution. Our experiments
validate VND’s functionality and shows its feasibility
in terms of quick service response and acceptable overhead; our simulation proves the VND architecture scales
to the size of a real data center network.