In this blog, I will cover the following:

• Overview and need for Network Virtualization
• Relation between Cloud management and Network Virtualization
• Network Virtualization approaches
• Overlay Networks
• Service chaining
• Popular Network Virtualization solutions – Vmware NSX, Juniper Opencontrail, Cisco ACI.

Overview and need for Network Virtualization

Network Virtualization allows for abstracting the Networking resources into a logical/software model so that the same set of physical resources can be shared by multiple tenants in a secure and isolated manner. There are 2 kinds of Networking resources, one is the physical resources like Router, Switch and another is appliances like Firewall, Load balancer etc. The appliance can be either physical or virtual. NFV(Network functions virtualization) can be considered a subset of Network Virtualization.

Network Virtualization is similar to Server Virtualization. In server virtualization, compute resources are virtualized, while in network virtualization, networking resources are virtualized. Network virtualization took much longer time to come to the market compared to server virtualization. Following picture gives a good comparison between the 2.

Continue reading Network Virtualization – Overview and popular commercial solutions →