Network Virtualization - VirtualizedGeek Tech Talk Episode 11
Transcript
hi you're listening to episode 11 of virtualized Geeks Tech talk today is April the 30th uh I'm recording a day later because I wanted to talk about uh Network virtualization tonight and I wanted to give my uh blog post a little bit time to marinate the one that kind of goes with this video uh if you have been paying any attention to virtualized geek in the past couple of weeks I've been really focusing a lot on sdn actually wrote a blog post over on search network.com
uh about uh sdn and uh specifically Network virtualization and if VMware was going to make Cisco irrelevant at some point it was a little bit tongue and cheek Cisco of course won't become irrelevant it was more of a stab at uh VMware about it aggressive uh approach to marketing and disrupting various markets they go into uh they announced a few weeks ago or a couple of months ago rather that they were going to uh roll out their own hybrid Cloud um they've been extremely disruptive obviously
in the server space with their uh virtualization solution uh servers are now probably a commodity mainly because of the technologies that they've pushed on the X8 X8 x86 in the Spectrum uh now companies like Dale HP have to completely change courses IBM recently uh or is rumored to want to sell their server business to Lenovo or to anyone for that matter uh this is all because just like the PC industry the server business has become uh commoditized so I kind of uh fast forward the frames
a few years and and to the Future and said what will the world look like with a VMware completely engaged in what they are pursuing with their iner acquisition and the whole concept of a software defined data center so you know you start with uh virtualization from the x86 perspective you completely turn uh the way that we deliver x86 services to our customers within the data data center completely on its head you know now we can do really cool stuff from operation side we can uh
put applications on all kinds of Hardware uh we really don't know um without looking at a console really what server what physical server is running what application at any moment DRS and Technology similar to DRS allow us to uh automatically vmotion machines from one physical Hardware piece of Hardware to another phys piece of physical Hardware based on load on the distributor load of your cluster so we've completely changed how we approach x86 Service delivery and similarly VMware is looking to change the network world on this
head with network virtualization I had a little bit difficult time kind of wrapping my head around Network virtualization the big difference for me was the physical layer you know the there's a big difference between kind of x86 virtualization versus Network virtualization uh you know you're kind of servicing two different crowds with the technology with the different technology and delivery approaches with x86 virtualization is pretty simple you're providing uh independent op operating systems with on based on independent hardware to uh applications so you've abstracted the physical
Hardware uh from the application provided that uh abstracted operating system or abstract set of Hardware to an operating system which is presented to the application when you think about abstracting uh the network from physical Hardware that gets a little bit more confused you know you you think about a physical piece of networking gear a physical piece of networking gear has to connect to the endpoints that it services so how do you abstract the connection the connectivity of a endpoint whether it's a uh piece of server
Hardware another uh piece of networking gear or a enduser piece of equipment how do you abstract that uh or how do you create abstraction from that from the physical device so after doing a bit of dig digging a bit of reading I relook at uh vmware's announcement uh from their blog for the NSX solution their hypervisor based virtual uh Network solution and really I I kind of uh there's a picture on that site that really put it all together for me I'll add the picture to
the show notes on virtualized geek uh or I'll better yet I'll just reference my blog po post on network virtualization as I understand it the concept is actually pretty simple when you think about it you're abstracting not the connectivity but the concepts of the devices so from a x86 perspective we abstracted the concept of what is server Hardware from the underlying hardware and built virtual hardware and the networking World same thing we've abstracted the switch router uh IDs uh whatever networking gear you want to the
firewall we've abstracted that from the physical connectivity and from the physical layer and create logical representations of these devices so you have a logical firewall you have a logical uh router you can have a logical switch and underneath that the underneath layer of that is the phys physical connectivity so you have some sort of physical connectivity still but you can think of that more as a dumb conduit or a conduit that allows uh the entire network to touch itself so you might have a 24 Port
access device we won't call it a switch we'll call it a a regular x86 it can be a x86 dumb device that has EET connectivity uh once you get that layer connectivity into the physical device that's and the interconnect connected all together that's where the physical layer can be abstracted from so you can have Port one on device on Port one on physical device one it can be connected to a virtual switch it can be connected to another it can be trunk to another physical switch
it can be a uh physical server that Port is the part that gets abstracted the uh hypervisor can now assign that port to any physical or any logical uh Network device within the hypervisor so let's say you have a virtual firewall and that Port one that's connected to a web server can be Port one on or Port zero on your on your virtual firewall now I can apply rules to that and Port two on the virtual firewall can be on a completely different uh Hardware layer
so you can have a you know a a 48 Port uh access switch on the other end of your data center or even in a completely different data center since it's virtualized from a virtual sense it can be on the same virtual firewall that completely changes how we approach networking the question you know there may be marketing questions or actually practical questions about what whether or not the underlying physical Hardware can give the performance needed to rival uh traditional data center Fabrics but the paradigm shift
and how we think about um deploying and managing networks completely changes now all of the advantages that we had in x86 virtualization we now have in um virtual networking we can use commod Hardware we can uh use standard config configurations that can be copied from one uh Network device to another logical Network device we can pause rewind I.E we can uh snapshot revert back to configurations we can deploy templates all of the tools that we're used to in our virtual server infrastructure we now have available
from a management perspective in our virtual Network again the argument is how is this better than like a Cisco one uh approach to network and network management how does it uh compare to a juniper uh data center fabric uh uh their data center fabric approach you know they they addressed a lot of these types of complexities in their Solutions it may not give you the port level uh flexibility that the virtual solution gives you and you may not be able to run it over commodity Hardware
but I'm thinking cost there there's going to be a cost uh performance benefit when it comes to virtualized networking or network virtualization this is actually a pretty exciting time in networking for me personally I haven't really touched networking to this level in quite some time uh it just hasn't been interesting to me but this whole concept of network virtualization or changing not just Network virtualization but changing the way you manage the network from a protocol Centric um perspective to more of a logical uh sdn perspective
is all exciting stuff to me and this suplay of network virtualization is really uh really good geeky stuff I hope you enjoyed episode 11 of virtual Tech talks we will talk to you again next week on yet whatever topic comes to mind thanks and have a great week
