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Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT) Meets the Network

At a high level the concepts of larger packets, hardware offload, reduced CPU load and interrupts all make sense

Last week I walked through the packet formats for VXLAN and NVGRE specifically focused on ways by which the overlay packets provide information to the physical network that help the physical network. Some of the initial extreme thoughts that the overlay and physical network can and should be completely ignorant of each other have softened more recently and more pragmatic thoughts of collaborating layers are being articulated. At Plexxi we have often mentioned that we believe the physical network and the overlay need to be closely orchestrated to get the most benefit out of the total network solution. And orchestration != ECMP.

In addition to VXLAN and NVGRE, Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT) is an encapsulation mechanism used by VMware, mostly for communication between server based vSwitches. It is a bit more involved and complicated than VXLAN and NVGRE, mostly because it was designed to carry large data packets, up to 64 Kbytes. Physical networks have limitations on the size of a packet that can be transferred. Ethernet standard maximum transmission unit (MTU) used to be 1500 bytes, but most ethernet devices these days can support jumbo packets allowing packets of 4, 9 or even 16 Kbytes in size. Even at those sizes, large data transfers are somewhat hampered by the work involved in taking a large chunk of data and then chopping them up into smaller portions to be transmitted. In a response to this, hardware vendors have taken some of this functionality and added it to the Network Interface Cards (NICs) on servers and have them do most of this segmentation and re-assembly work based on how TCP takes large portions of data and chops them into smaller segments. Doing his in hardware means it can be done faster, but more importantly, it removes this burden from the server CPUs, allowing them to do other (more useful) work.

STT was designed to make use of these TCP capabilities in NICs. STT can take ethernet packets up to 64 Kbytes from a VM on a server, and tunnel it to its destination as a 64 Kbyte entity. This STT frame has to be chopped into smaller pieces to match the MTU of the physical network, but an STT packet looks just like a TCP segment to the receiving NICs, allowing them to reconstruct the original 64 Kbyte packet without needing the CPU.

When the sending tunnel endpoint receives a large chunk of data to be transmitted at another VM at the other side of a tunnel, the vSwitch takes several steps to encapsulate this packet. First, it adds an STT Frame Header to the packet.

STT Frame Format 1

The STT Header is 18 bytes in length and has a variety of administrative fields, but the key field is the Context ID. This is a 64 bit field and its intended use is similar to the VXLAN Network Identifier (VNI) or the NVGRE Virtual Subnet ID (VSID). While the semantics of this field are somewhat defined, its value and how to use it is left open in the latest specifications. Its main purpose is to provide the receiving tunnel endpoint the information it needs to determine where this packet needs to be sent after decapsulation.

After the STT Frame Header has been added, this new packet (original packet  + new STT header) is chopped into smaller pieces so that each piece is at least 62 bytes smaller than the MTU of the physical network. Each of these new segments receives 24 byte TCP like header, a normal 20 byte IP header, and of course the final 18 byte Ethernet header before transmission. The magic (or ugliness for those less enamored by STT) is in the TCP like header. These 24 bytes are formatted just like a normal TCP header to ensure the hardware in the NICs can re-assemble segments that belong together. The traditional Acknowledgement field in TCP is used as a fragment ID, essentially telling the NIC that all packets/segments that come in with the same fragment ID belong together and should be reassembled into the larger original ethernet frame. The traditional Sequence number is used as an offset indicator, to tell the NIC in what order the fragments need to be put together.

STT Frame Format 2

Similar to VXLAN and NVGRE described last week, STT has a mechanism to create entropy for the physical network to distinguish flows from each other and allow them to be balanced using ECMP (or link aggregation – LAG) based deployments. In STT, the TCP source port is used to create entropy. The originating tunnel end point will use some hash calculation on the original packets header information and use the result to populate the TCP source port. Switches in the physical network can now use the TCP port information from the tunneled packet in their hash calculation for ECMP or LAG packet distribution.

While STT is likely to be more efficient than either VXLAN or NVGRE for the transfer of large amount of information because it offloads the segmentation and re-assembly, it carries significantly more overhead than either VXLAN or NVGRE in additional header information for smaller packets. STT adds 80 bytes of new header to a VM originated ethernet packet for the first segment of this packet, 62 for each following segment. Compare that to a consistent 46 bytes for each NVGRE encapsulated packet, and 54 bytes for VXLAN. For traffic between VMs on the same server this may not matter, but it certainly does for traffic carried across the physical network. For the plentiful mice flows, we have likely doubled the size and bandwidth required for each.

A probably more significant drawback of STT comes from its strength. Designed for large packet transfers, once an original packet is encapsulated with STT header, chopped into parts, then encapsulated into individual ethernet, IP and TCP (like) headers, only the first packet provides any clue or context of the original source, destination, protocol, application and other content. The relevant pieces of that will only be found in the first segment, any follow up segments only provide enough information about the tunnel endpoints and no other original context without the first segment. And that makes debugging really hard. It also makes it hard to differentiate traffic on the physical network, even at a very high level Virtual Network identifier. And every existing network based service (realizing that one of the goals of overlay networks is to push this to the vSwitches themselves) will also have a hard time deciding what to do with these packets.

At a high level the concepts of larger packets, hardware offload, reduced CPU load and interrupts all make sense. But most data center ethernet networks can easily support 9k or even 16k packets, so perhaps the gap between 16k packet based transfer and 64k semi-stream based communication is really not that much considering that the bulk of packets are small to begin with (remember those mice and elephants?). Perhaps aligning the MTU of the virtual port with that of the network may be worthwhile to have the STT and original header in each and every packet on the wire. Regardless of whether that is a real wire, or a virtual one.

[Today's fun fact: One of the primary reasons the Mayflower pilgrims ended their voyage at Plymouth Rock was pretty much the same reason people today suspend their journeys: they ran out of beer. No need for a funny punch line on that one]

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