Concepts of network Virtualization

Author: Fan Jun Frank Fan)

Sina Weibo: @ frankfan7

Network virtualization will be the last mile in the journey to realize the vision of a software-defined data center. IDC estimates that the network virtualization market will grow from 2013 million dollars in to 2016 billion in 3.7. Many giants have made great strides, and many new startups have targeted this direction. Let's talk about what this means from the following aspects.

IGame between giants

As cloud computing gradually enters the maturity stage, it becomes increasingly urgent to solve the challenges faced by traditional network architecture. Small and medium-sized enterprises may be okay. Who is the most worried? These Internet and IaaS giants. The OpenFlow developed by Stanford University is a concrete implementation of the concept of network virtualization. Google and Facebook are leaders in supporting OpenFlow and actively participate in standardized development and promotion activities of Open Networking Foundation (ONF.

Traditional network providers have to keep pace with the times, or they may be bypassed by major customers for independent development. Nicira, A emerging network virtualization company, has seized the opportunity of the times and integrated it with Openstack to provide solutions for many giants including eBay.

VMware, which is already in the leading position in the server virtualization market, has also made frequent attacks. In June 2012, with VMware12.6 billion US dollars in mergers and acquisitions, at that time, the turnover was only 1 million US Dollars Nicira, aroused heated discussion. The importance of network virtualization is evident.

Network virtualization is a subtle game between giants. What is the final situation? We will wait and see. Small and medium-sized enterprises and IT practitioners, although this is a big game, no matter who wins or loses, will eventually affect our retail investors? We should plan ahead.

 2. Challenges of traditional network architecture

In recent years, the rapid development of server and storage virtualization technology has made it very common to dynamically and quickly allocate computing and storage resources. This greatly shortens the server creation time. In contrast, the current traditional network architecture is not very powerful and has become a short board in the entire resource allocation process.

 

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For example,IIn many cases, manual intervention is required to provide network resources. Network switch port configuration, ACL, routing, and so on.IIIn the case of WAN data centers, most data centers are interconnected through layer-3 network protocols. If applications are transplanted between data centers, pay special attention to the network environment configuration in applications. If the number of servers is large, this is definitely a time-consuming and laborious task.3.Enterprise-level mergers require rapid integration of network systems. Those who have implemented integration projects should know how deep the water is. Project complexity and implementation cycle are both challenging.ThuIntegration of existing enterprise systems and cloud platforms. The previous SaaS system may be fast, but you do not want SaaS to become an information island. You may need data interaction between SaaS and your existing systems, such as SAP. If you use the IaaS public cloud, you may want to integrate it with existing systems. This is the concept of hybrid cloud. This also takes into account whether your network can be seamlessly transplanted from local to public cloud.V.Network resources cannot be fully utilized. Most companies can use 30%-40% of network resources. In many cases, a large amount of resources are idle. In some cases, network resources are insufficient due to the surge in data volume periodically. Many ISP or communication network providers are scratching their heads. In the case of a small increase in user base fees, the data traffic users expect is much larger than before. In addition to network resizing, it is more important to improve the utilization of existing networks. Google claims that their internal network usage will be close to 100% thanks to the use of Openflow (an implementation in network virtualization technology)

3.What is network virtualization?

In fact, this concept is no stranger. Overlays, MPLS, VPNs, VLANs, LISP, Virtual routers, and VRFs can all be considered as a manifestation of network virtualization. However, the current emerging network virtualization concepts far exceed the above technologies in terms of depth, breadth, and impact.

Simply put, some functions of the network layer are removed from the hardware to create a new virtual network layer. If we compare it with server virtualization, it will help us understand this concept.

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For applications running on virtual machines, you only need to use the virtual CPU and virtual memory supported by Hypervisor. Therefore, the application itself does not need to care about the underlying hardware devices. At the same time, there is basically no need to change the operating system and application. Sometimes it may be simply optimized for virtualization.

Similar to network virtualization, applications do not need to care much about network information in the traditional sense, such as routing and IP addresses. These are managed by the Network Virtual Layer. The underlying hardware provides the most basic functions, and many complex information and configurations are also managed by the virtual network layer. For example, L2, L3, tagging, couters, ACLs, etc) and many network services with two or more layers only need to deal with the network virtual layer, and there is no need to know what hardware is running at the underlying layer.

The further impact is the O & M. Because a lot of information is extracted to the Virtual Layer of the network, we can manage and configure it more efficiently, and easily implement configuration programmability and consistency. There is no need to worry about complicated iOS configurations for each hardware device.

Explains the benefits of network virtualization.

 

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Network virtualization is not equivalent to a software-defined network.These two concepts are often confused. Network virtualization is a solution, and software-defined networks are only one of the many implementation methods of this solution. After extracting some network information and functions, we always have a way to store the information and keep abreast of their status. At this time, the software-defined network will be useful. There is usually a module that can be centrally controlled to implement these functions.

Please pay attention to the following: implementation of graphic network Virtualization

 References:

VMware NSX Network Virtualization alization

Network Heresy

Open Source, Open Interfaces, and Open Networking

VXLAN, STT, and looking beyond the wire format

Brad hedlund's blog

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