Huawei Technologies Huawei Technologies Cisco IBM EMC This document describes the control plane protocol requirements when NVE is not co-located with the hypervisor on a server. A control plane protocol (or protocols) between a hypervisor and its associated external NVE(s) is used for the hypervisor to populate its virtual machines states to the NVE(s) for further handling. This document illustrates the functionalities required by such control plane signaling protocols and outlines the high level requirements to be fulfiled. Virtual machine states and state transitioning are summarized to help clarifying the needed requirements.