Re: [dc] Requirement for a method to manage mac address in DC

[Truman Boyes <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Thomas Narten <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Truman Boyes <[e-mail]> writes:
>
> > The L2 separation between multiple tenants is true in most circumstances
> in
> > DCs, but in commodity computing (ie. VPS, low cost dedicated servers, or
> > co-location) there is a concern on IPv4 address exhaustion or waste, so
> > machines/instances are grouped on single L2 segments. It is possible to
> > have virtual MAC overlaps on these segments. Is this something that this
> > group wishes to evaluate options to solve?
>
> IMO, this is putting the cart before the horse.
>
> Can we first get a sense for how big a problem this is in practice and
> whether existing mitigation approaches are not sufficient?
>
> I.e., is this a real problem causing significant pain today, or are
> their other bigger "pain points" that we should be looking at?
>
> Thomas
>
>
In the VPS/VM world,  I would say it's not a significant issue because
there are single entities (Organizations) that manage the MAC addresses.
Typically software would just increment the virtual MACs, and this does not
require external protocols to ensure uniqueness. If there are many
provisioning systems that manage VMs on the same network segment then they
will need to keep their database in sync.

-- 
--truman