Virtual Transits: A Flexible Platform for Network Virtualization across Data Centers

Network virtualization is crucial in data centers environments for interconnecting all physical and virtualized resources to create a complete semblance of an integrated computing infrastructure. Much of the existing research on data center networking has focused on network mechanisms inside the datacenter. Little attention has been paid to networking mechanisms for integrating multiple data centers. In this paper we introduce Virtual Transits, a flexible platform providing a novel solution to dynamically build and manage virtual networks across multiple data centers. Virtual Transits can also incorporate several important datacenter networking schemes into a coherent platform that enables seamless integration of intracloud and intercloud traffic. Through our implementation and performance evaluation on a real deployment, we show that our system provides a promising and efficient solution for inter-cloud networking, test beds federation, and software-defined networking test beds.