Static validation of network device configurations in virtualized multi-tenant datacenters

A recent fashion to reduce the device cost of datacenter networks is to leverage multi-tenancy, with which multiple virtual networks of different customers (tenants) are consolidated over a single physical infrastructure. The use of multi-tenancy, however, poses significant operational cost due to the complicated device configuration and the rise in risks of misconfigurations in such shared environment; Hence deploying a tenant requires network engineers to pay careful attention to validating the correctness of corresponding device configuration commands before actual deployment. In this work, we present a methodology that statically validates network device configurations before deployment by predicting a posteriori network states after execution of those commands. We mainly make use of graph-based techniques to achieve both (a) extensibility to deal with various types of network devices in datacenters (provided from abstracting configurations as graphs), as well as (b) interpretability of the validation results (provided from visualization - a key benefit from graphs). The evaluation with a dataset synthesized from a set of actual configuration files results in 68% reduction of the time to validate them on average.