6WIND is pleased to announce our latest vRouter release, including:

● Virtual Border Router and Virtual Security Gateway 2.0 – software network appliances for network builders
● Virtual Accelerator 1.8 – hypervisor networking power
● 6WINDGate 4.21 – foundation for OEMs building networking products

A major new feature is our brand new management framework. You may have heard about it if you follow our blogs here and there or our webinars. This new feature makes our vRouters ready for integration with next-gen management frameworks thanks to its NETCONF/YANG APIs and also includes a brand new CLI.

In addition, Virtual Accelerator now proposes YANG-based telemetry and supports OpenStack Queens. And we have also introduced new networking features in 6WINDGate for CG-NAT, MPLS and QoS.

Let’s review these features in detail, product by product.

Virtual Border Router & Virtual Security Gateway Appliances

Management

We have decided to completely revamp the management of our vRouters to provide our customers with the programmable APIs to easily integrate with third party orchestrators, monitoring systems and management tools.

This work is now complete and I am proud to announce the availability of our new management system based on NETCONF and YANG, with a brand new CLI. You can check our online documentation to preview our brand new CLI and request an evaluation of our vRouter software.

Here is a short abstract from our latest webinar, where you can see the CLI in action!

Policy-Based Routing

Policy-based routing is a way to forward packets based on multiple criteria. Packets can be matched according to their source or destination address or prefix, their packet firewall mark (which can be set using ACLs) or the inbound interface.

Check the PBR user guide for more information.

BGP Flowspec

The BGP flow specification (flowspec) feature allows you to rapidly deploy and propagate filtering and policing functionality among a large number of BGP peer routers to mitigate the effects of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack over the network.

See the Routing user guide for more information.

And more…

In a continued effort to make our vRouter compatible with our customers’ virtualization environments, we have also validated the support of Amazon Web Services with private AMI images and the support of the Proxmox Virtual Environment.

Virtual Accelerator

KPIs/Telemetry (YANG-based)

Virtual Accelerator now supports YANG-based KPIs to retrieve monitoring information and transmit them to a time-based series database. An example of integration with InfluxDB/Grafana is documented at https://github.com/6WIND/supervision-grafana.

OpenStack Queens

Virtual Accelerator has been validated with OpenStack Queens.

6WINDGate

As the foundation technology behind Turbo Appliances and Virtual Accelerator, our 6WINDGate product inherits all the features listed above, plus some interesting new beta features.

Fast Path CG-NAT enhancements

Our Carrier Grade NAT module has been enhanced with:
● IP pool resizing
● H.323 ALG
● Hairpinning

Fast Path MPLS dataplane

This new fast path module implements MPLS dataplane features, including packet forwarding,
label swapping, PHP, IPv4 and IPv6 support for Next Hop Label Forwarding Entry and NULL Label. It is synchronized with the Linux kernel MPLS configuration done with ip -f mpls commands.

Fast Path QoS Advanced

In addition to the Fast Path QoS Basic module that provides rate limiting, this new module support advanced ingress and egress QoS, including:
● Classification and marking
● Metering
● Policing
● Shaping
● Scheduling
● Congestion management

Fast Path QoS Advanced implements a pipeline model with customizable distribution of worker and scheduler threads. It does not synchronize the Linux TC configuration; it has its own API to configure QoS classification and scheduling rules.

Control Plane Routing based on FRRouting

We have integrated the new FRR IP routing protocol suite in place of good old Quagga. FRR was started by long-time Quagga developers, in order to create the best routing protocol stack available. For this release, FRR has brought us the support of dynamic routing with VRFs, BGP Flowspec (which is actually one of 6WIND’s contributions), among others. And in the future, we plan to leverage FRR’s LDP for MPLS, L3VPN features, PIM for Multicast and more!

Third-party and hardware support

As usual, we have updated the open source software included in the vRouter to the latest versions:
● VRRP: keepalived 2.0.7
● IKE: strongSwan 5.6.2
● Crypto: QAT 1.7
● DPDK 18.05
● OpenStack Queens

And finally, we have added the Intel® Atom™ Processor C3000 Series to our list of supported platforms.

I hope that all this makes you as excited to deploy our new vRouter features as I am to present them! And if you are not a customer yet, don’t hesitate to check our online documentation and to contact us. We will be happy to provide you with an evaluation version.

By the way, have you checked our updated 6WINDGate Product Documentation web page? You’ll find detailed presentations and white papers about our vRouter architecture. It’s good reading for the upcoming winter evenings.

My next post will be a deep dive into the new routing features of our vRouter and how they are managed. We’re gonna have fun! Stay tuned!


Yann Rapaport is Vice President Of Product Management for 6WIND.