Abstract
Modern data centers can consist of hundreds of thousands
of servers and millions of virtualized end hosts. Managing
address assignment while simultaneously enabling scalable
communication is a challenge in such an environment. We
present ALIAS, an addressing and communication protocol
that automates topology discovery and address assignment
for the hierarchical topologies that underlie many data center
network fabrics. Addresses assigned by ALIAS interoperate
with a variety of scalable communication techniques.
ALIAS is fully decentralized, scales to large network sizes,
and dynamically recovers from arbitrary failures, without
requiring modifications to hosts or to commodity switch
hardware. We demonstrate through simulation that ALIAS
quickly and correctly configures networks that support up
to hundreds of thousands of hosts, even in the face of failures
and erroneous cabling, and we show that ALIAS is a
practical solution for auto-configuration with our NetFPGA
testbed implementation.