Trellis: A Platform for Building Flexible, Fast Virtual Networks on Commodity Hardware

The authors describe Trellis, a platform for hosting virtual networks on shared commodity hardware. Trellis allows each virtual network to define its own topology, control protocols, and forwarding tables, while amortizing costs by sharing the physical infrastructure. Trellis synthesizes two container-based virtualization technologies, VServer and NetNS, as well as a new tunneling mechanism, EGRE, into a coherent platform that enables high-speed virtual networks. They describe the design and implementation of Trellis and evaluate its packet-forwarding rates relative to other virtualization technologies and native kernel forwarding performance.