[sami] Trying to figure out where we are

[Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>]

As the discussion has progressed it's become more-or-less clear
that there might possibly perhaps be one or two interesting
problems here, maybe, although the people pushing for the
chartering of something-or-other (anything!) to do with
data centers and virtualization seem to be working very hard
indeed to obscure anything that might turn out to have some
value.

First, there appears to be a substantial problem related to
moving flow-associated state in middleboxes when a network
connection (deliberately keeping "connection" vague for the
moment) fails over.  This has certainly come up in the context
of multihomed connections in sctp, and to be honest I
haven't followed that as closely as I should.  Still, even
if sctp has something that works brilliantly there would be
questions about applying their mechanism in a different
context.

Second, there appears to be another substantial problem,
this one related to how to handle routing and network
state when a VM is migrated from one hypervisor to a
network-topographically-remote hypervisor when both are
on the same layer 2 subnet being tunneled over a layer
3 transport (or when they're not on the same subnet
at all, which I gather is considerably less common).

The problem here is that it's not at all clear that there's
a constituency for the work.  I'm not talking about people
to write and review internet drafts, but rather companies
standing up and saying "We want this problem solved and we
think it should be solved through an open standards process,"
and data centers/service providers standing up and saying
"We would deploy this."  Saying that you're absolutely
certain that somebody else would say one of these things
does not count.

It would be unfortunate if the IETF were to sink valuable
resources into another effort that nobody cares about
other than people looking for stuff to put on their CV.
Is there an audience for this work?

Melinda