Huawei Technologies Huawei Technologies Cisco IBM EMC In a Split-NVE architecture, the functions of the NVE are split across a server and an external network equipment which is called an external NVE. The server-resident control plane functionality resides in control software, which may be part of a hypervisor or container management software; for simplicity, this draft refers to the hypervisor as the location of this software. A control plane protocol(s) between a hypervisor and its associated external NVE(s) is used for the hypervisor to distribute its virtual machine networking state to the external NVE(s) for further handling. This document illustrates the functionality required by this type of control plane signaling protocol and outlines the high level requirements. Virtual machine states as well as state transitioning are summarized to help clarifying the needed protocol requirements.