Network 2.0: Virtualization without Limits
So the theme of the day is Network Virtualization, Software defined networks and taking virtualization to its logical conclusion i.e. server, storage and network in a giant resource pool that can be allocated/assigned any which way. Although its easier said then done. Server and Storage virtualization were a bit simpler since we were dealing with one OS that needed to provide the right abstraction layer. The H/W resource pool (disk, cpu, network, memory, etc) was managed by the single OS so provisioning it between various virtual machines or storage pool was a bit simpler. The network by definition is useful only when multiple devices are connected and trying to treat them as a single resource pool is harder. A virtual networks has to deal with not just links, bandwidth, latency and queues but also
higher level functionality like routing, load balancing, firewalling, DNS, DHCP, VPN, etc. etc. And we haven’t even talked about how this all will hook up together along with virtual machines and virtual storage pool in a easy manner. Now before you argue that every component is already virtualized (which is very true), one could argue that it still doesn’t give me a virtual network. It Continue reading
