Wholesale Virtualisation and Selective QinQ

Recently I have been working on a solution to provide Wholesale Access to hosted VMs. Several of my customers have “Cloud Environments” - call it IaaS, virtualisation, a fad or whatever, this is something that I have been asked to come up with a solution for more than once.

To explain the requirements outlined in this article, I should give a little background on the design requirements and constraints. For some of my customers the standard build is to include 2x VLANs for each Customer - a Live VLAN, and an Internal/Backend network. If the customer has more than one VM in a cluster then all servers will share these VLANs. Unfortunately this quickly runs through the available VLANs (And we love that the Nexus 5k only supports 512 vlans). This limited the number of customers in a single VM cluster, due to VLAN limitations inherent in Data Centre switches.