What is the role of hardware in network stack and virtualization?

First, the network hardware that constitutes the physical network structure needs to transmit IP data packets. This is important and will never change. No matter whether network virtualization is deployed or not, hardware is required to transmit data packets between systems in the data center.

Although many network stack solutions connect to Virtual Switches through channel protocols, such as Virtual Extensible LAN, hardware can also be used to replace network stacks. If virtual switches are used in the network stack, they also need to integrate hardware-based switches to use the hardware as a gateway. In this way, the physical and virtual server environments can be seamlessly integrated, which is another important role of hardware in network virtualization. Remember that some special application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) are also required to replace the network stack on the hardware switch.

There are not many details about network virtualization deployment in the production environment. We do not know the impact of network virtualization on physical server capacity (CPU, memory, etc.) for physical servers that serve as a large number of vswitch channels, I don't know how much impact they have on network performance. If these factors have a great impact, the data center may eventually need to use a network virtualization solution to replace the hardware network stacks of each top-level rack switch and each virtual switch. In this case, Hardware plays a greater role in the network virtualization solution.

In addition, the hardware will continue to play an important role in realizing the visibility of end-to-end network traffic in the data center where network virtualization is deployed. Imagine that the network between two virtual machines cannot be viewed by tracking the source of your enterprise's data center, so you have the hardware with APIs and real-time visibility through programmable agents, it is very valuable for data centers. It is equally important to use a background analysis engine to analyze the collected data and understand the traffic and application behavior. In addition, the engine also needs to optimize the network and create an open feedback loop.

Although the hardware is still important, the customer also needs to focus on the overall solution. For example, is there a feedback loop supporting two-way communication? Is it easy to operate and manage? Is there integration and visibility between virtual and physical environments? And so on. Not every customer environment needs all the features described above, but some of these features must be taken into account in data center updates and redesign that support services.