vmesh

Introduction

VMesh is a decentralized Layer 3 mesh router and protocol designed for open network interconnection.

It securely handles everything you'll need to interconnect your globally distributed nodes or peer with other networks: packet routing, route announcement, authentication, distributed configuration management, prefix filtering, and more.

VMesh supports only IPv6 in the routed network.

Getting started

Knowledge of routing protocols such as BGP would help a lot in understanding how VMesh works.

Take a look at config.example.json and scripts/ to get an idea about the detailed usage.

Usually you need a globally routable IPv6 block to make full use of VMesh, but you can also request IPv6 prefix allocation and transit from an existing VMesh network through peering. (See Peering, Interconnect with AS209291)

Detailed documentation is still TBD.

Peering

Specify "external_peer_certs": ["/path/to/your/peers/cert.crt"] in your config.json to allow interconnection with a node with a certificate outside your PKI tree. It's advised to prefix-filter announcements from external peers - see the "Distributed config" section for how to do that.

Distributed config

Use the vnconfigsign tool to sign your distributed configuration in JSON format and produce a .bin. Then start any one node with the -initial-dc your_signed_config.bin option to sync the configuration with the rest of your network. As long as any single node on your network is alive with a latest version of the distributed configuration, all directly/indirectly connected nodes will eventually be in sync.

The JSON format distributed config should look like:

{
	"prefix_whitelist": {
		"a.vnet.example.com": [
			"2001:db8:1000::/48,max_prefix_len=64",
			"64:ff9b::/96,max_prefix_len=96"
		],
		"b.vnet.example.com": [
			"2001:db8:2000::/48"
		]
	}
}

Interconnect with AS209291

VMesh is deployed on my network (AS209291) and is handling most internal traffic among nodes in the globally distributed network.

Email me at [email protected] if you want to peer.