The traditional structure uses a physical switch and router to manage data switching and routing and control of information. It is necessary to configure all routers and switches independently and based on the topology designed by IT managers. In traditional methods, IT managers manage, control, and monitor the network structure; only a few additional tools are available to do their duty. The old ways have a high probability of error because the network infrastructure hardware resources are enormous, and there is a possibility of human error. In contrast, network virtualization (NV) converts network hardware resources into virtual machines and their integrated management.
What is network virtualization?
Network virtualization separates network services from the leading hardware and provides a virtual network version. It is possible to create, prepare and manage network programs in software while using the physical network infrastructure as a backplane for packet transmission in network virtualization. We need the physical infrastructure of the network to transfer packets. The software includes physical network resources such as Switching, Routing, Firewalling, Load balancer, and Virtual Private Networks (VPN).
Advantages of network virtualization
- Network virtualization helps organizations improve speed and security by automating and simplifying many processes to run the Datacenter network. Also, it manages the network and security in the Cloud space. Some of the main advantages of network virtualization are:
- Notable reduction of network preparation time
- Greater operational efficiency by automating manual processes
- Deployment and relocation of workloads independent of the physical topology
- Improving network security in Datacenter
- Central management of Datacenter network infrastructure through GUI interface
- Removing layer two topics such as STP and limiting the number of VLAN IDs
- Removing traffic such as Broadcast and Unknown Unicast in SDN and controlling them through NSX or Cisco ACI Components
- It has a central control plane with a central ARP table.
- Ability to create 16 million different segments using VXLAN or GENEVE.
- Providing automation infrastructure to developers by NSX-T as an API.