An Analytics Approach to Traffic Analysis in

Network Virtualization

Hui Zhang, Junghwan Rhee, Nipun Arora,

Qiang Xu, Cristian Lumezanu, Guofei Jiang

www.nec-labs.com

Motivation

2

Challenges in virtual network trouble-shooting– Complex configurations– Miscellaneous network devices– Assorted traffic groups

Multi-tenant Data Center

An in-host network

FLOWVIEW Overview

3

FLOWVIEW is a tool for visualizing and analyzing OVS packet traces– Summarization (from individual events to packet traces)– Data reduction (trace categorization and clustering)– Analysis (visualization and comparative analysis)

Trace Slicing

A holistic view on the lifetime of a packet– a series of events collected from routers/switches

that the packet goes through during its routing.– similar to IP Traceback output.

4

The snapshot of a FLOWVIEW slice example

Slice Features

FLOWVIEW defines three kinds of features on slices– Path features– Link features– Packet features

5

Path feature examples

Trace Analysis

Clustering of trace slices Ranking of trace slices Query of trace slices Verification of trace slices

6

A ranking example

Implementation

7

Clustering based on slice features

Conclusion

FLOWVIEW is a tool for visualizing and analyzing data center network packet traces– individual trace events from hypervisors and

switches are re-organized into trace slices that represent the life-time of packets.

– offers versatile analytics features such as clustering, ranking, querying, verification as well as a graphical interface.

8

9

www.nec-labs.com