Data Centers present interesting data networking scalability challenges that traditional data communication protocols struggle to address. Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) is a network virtualization protocol that improves the scalability problems in Data Centers and large Cloud Computing deployments. VXLAN encapsulates Layer 2 MAC frames within Layer 4 UDP frames in order to scale up to 16 million logical networks yet provides Layer 2 adjacency across IP networks. Concern has been raised for the computational processing power involved in the encapsulation and scaling.

The purpose of this work was to examine the performance overhead and scalability of the VXLAN protocol.