Introduction: Milin Desai, Director, Product Management at VMware, presented his company’s views on network virtualization, its advantages, current and future products at a late day VMUG session on May 1, 2013 in Santa Clara, CA. The talk on Network Virtualization was in the context of a Software Designed Data Center (SD-DC), where all intra-structure (compute, storage, networking, security, etc) is virtualized and delivered as a service. In this scenario, control of all DC equipment is via VMware software running in commodity x-86 based servers. Discussion: The physical DC network was positioned as a bottleneck and barrier to realization of the SD-DC. In particular, the network was said to have many weaknesses: Slow provisioning of new applications and services Limited placement of workloads (which are dependent on network connectivity/availability and/or security constraints) Limited mobility of apps (due to phyical constraints) Hardware dependent on type of server (which is inflexible) Intensive operations (to maintain or change the network) In sharp contrast, these limitations disappear when using network virtualization (to be defined later in this article): Programmatic provisioning Place any workload anywhere (e.g. on any physical infrastructure) Decouple applications and services from physical hardware Operationally efficient Pool resources; notion of “logical compartmentalization” Milin [...]
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