To dig a bit deeper into network virtualization via VMware: Stakes and Opportunities around data center issue.

 In acquiring Nicira, specialized in network virtualization, we noted that VMware aims progressively to reinforce its own network virtualization capabilities: the vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) product. According to VMware: ‘’as these two products are merged together, the result will be a single network virtualization platform that can work with any hypervisor, and will support all open cloud management systems (CMS), including OpenStack.’’

By comparison, server virtualization aims to introduce the abstraction of the virtual machine, while the network virtualization aims to introduce the virtual network abstraction.

Therefore a virtual network aims to provide all the properties of a physical network. It can be deployed on any vendor’s hardware; services are decoupled from the physical location of devices.

According to VMware: ‘’a direct consequence of this change is that all of the state associated with a virtual network can be managed programmatically, which leads to the same operational benefits provided by virtual machines. For example, all of the configuration associated with a virtual network configuration can be ‘snapshot’ at any point in time, stored in a single file, archived, rolled back, cloned, recreated, audited for compliance.’’

In 2012, VMware launched the Software-Defined Data Center initiative, where all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service.

‘’ we need to be able to virtualize other aspects of the data center, notably networking and storage, to fully deliver the promise of virtualization’’. Mentioned Steve Herrod.

Regarding another data center issues, we noted that resource usage efficiency is one of them that network virtualization helps to tackle.

Finally we also noted that:  a global view of virtual network state, entirely new security policies become possible: packets can be annotated with rich semantics extracted by the hypervisor from the VMs, allowing for in-network services to operate over semantically meaningful identifiers, such as users or applications, with a fidelity not possible from a network-only position.