BUM Traffic Forwarding

For Broadcast, Unknown-unicast, and Multicast traffic, aNET employs unicast replication where the ingress host performs local replication and forwards individual copies to each destination host through unicast tunnels. This approach eliminates the need for physical network switches to handle multicast or broadcast flooding within the overlay network.

Unicast Traffic Forwarding

The system optimizes unicast traffic through direct host-to-host communication within a single cluster, maintaining a distributed forwarding database that maps VM addresses to their current host locations. For multi-cluster environments, it implements inter-cluster forwarding through designated border gateways, while cross-site deployments utilize secure site-to-site VXLAN tunnels with traffic engineering policies to optimize wide area network utilization.

Network Visualization

aNET provides comprehensive network visualization capabilities that display the complete virtual network topology, including virtual switches, routers, firewalls, and their interconnections. This visual representation enables administrators to quickly understand network relationships, troubleshoot connectivity issues, and verify security policy implementation across the entire software-defined network environment.

East-West Distributed Firewall

The East-West Distributed Firewall provides granular access control and threat prevention for traffic flowing between virtual machines within the same data center. It operates through a distributed architecture where the firewall engine runs on every hypervisor host, enforcing security policies directly at the source of the traffic before packets leave the host. This approach eliminates the need to hairpin traffic through a centralized firewall appliance, reducing latency and avoiding network bottlenecks while providing stateful inspection and comprehensive logging capabilities.