How Network Virtualization Can Strengthen Business Networks

What if your business network could grow or shrink as needed?

Imagine being able to scale up your business with the push of a button. While you can't control the market shifts that may force you to scale up or scale down on a moment's notice, there are ways to ensure your network can grow and shrink as needed. This ability to intelligently add resources is critical to delivering the performance and reliability that end users demand.

Well-designed network infrastructure is the foundation of every efficient business operation. It has to be scalable, reliable, and flexible to serve your needs in the years to come. Traditional network environments are inflexible and need to be replaced with advanced alternatives to improve agility.

Network virtualization offers the possibility of introducing such a network that encapsulates all of the attributes mentioned above in your business environment. The concept of network virtualization is becoming more relevant as organizations adopt software-defined networking (SDN) technologies such as software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) software to facilitate hybrid cloud environments or help them deliver applications and information quickly.

Network virtualization is like a super-fast, highly resilient, multi-purpose business network that can be easily adjusted to meet your needs. It’s a network technology that allows businesses to quickly customize network capacity to reflect changing business conditions.

Networks have become complex in part due to the increase in communication devices and applications. To harness the potential of networks, understanding virtualization is critical.

Virtualization works by creating a virtual environment from one or more physical machines and pooling their resources to create a central machine. It involves the creation of virtual versions of an operating system (OS), server, storage device, or network resources. This gives a lot of flexibility, as you can optimize the usage of hardware devices and reduce operational complexity.

Virtualization technologies are growing exponentially, and the applications of virtualization are endless. It's used to consolidate physical servers into a single host for greater efficiency and lower costs. The same concept can be applied to network connectivity as well as creating separate IP networks between VMs.

Businesses can virtualize their entire network and accessible resources, including physical and logical networks, and routing and switching. IT teams can use virtualized networks to improve management and business, such as network segmentation, multi-tenant isolation, multi-location capacity control, automation, increased security, easier administration, troubleshooting network changes, and more.

Virtual networks are intended to simulate or imitate the functionality of the conventional network infrastructure. The network administrator creates a software-based view of the network from which infrastructure and services can be managed and deployed. The hardware is responsible for forwarding the data packets. In cloud computing, network virtualization guarantees minimal hardware consumption.

Network virtualization is a fundamentally new approach to networking, even if it uses your current network infrastructure. A virtual network can be built, saved, deleted, and recreated like virtual machines. More concretely, a virtualized network should enable businesses to:

• Decouple the network from the underlying hardware by implementing virtualization concepts in the network architecture
• Build a variable pool of transport capacity that can be assigned, used, and reused as needed
• Deploy networks in software that are completely separated from one another and from other changes in the data center
• Transfer, relocate, and duplicate the network in the same way as virtualized compute and storage resources
• Ensure consistent network functionality across your organization

After storage and server virtualization, network virtualization should be the obvious next step for businesses to achieve digital transformation. It allows the simultaneous operation of several services in the same physical network. Each virtual network adheres to business-oriented standards while delivering the security, availability, and performance necessary for each service, ranging from SAP and email to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and video.

Virtual networks improve the management and control of entire networks used by different applications. As a result, a more dependable and rapidly deployable service takes advantage of all underlying hardware capabilities.

Why do businesses need network virtualization?

The world is changing quickly, and today's business environment requires an agile networking infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, businesses now need to optimize their networking infrastructure investments to stay efficient and relevant.

Cost effective

Gone are the days when you had to rely on costly and time-intensive manual, proprietary, and upgrade-intensive equipment and solutions. Businesses now meet their customers' application and information needs with a cost-effective and supported network. This has made network virtualization a preferred strategy for many companies.

It reduces operating costs by automating management processes, improves business services by implementing scalable, flexible, and agile network infrastructure, and enables network administrators to implement new business solutions more quickly.

Consolidation of network elements

Virtualizing the environment makes it possible to implement different policies on a common infrastructure. It also helps consolidate any on-demand programming and provisioning of business networks while eliminating the need for physical alterations to core infrastructure.

Network management

Network virtualization eliminates the need for physical infrastructure-based networking and simplifies the deployment and management of networks. It helps resolve a wide range of network problems in software-defined data centers (SDDCs).

Network virtualization is a revolutionary technology that allows setting up and running entire networks parallel to existing networking equipment. This leads to quicker workload deployment, improved scalability, and network security in the face of ever-changing data centers.

Applications of network virtualization

Cloud computing has been the ultimate trend in infrastructures in the past few years. With the advent of cloud technology, online services and network architecture have become faster and more efficient. Network virtualization software enhances the scalability, reliability, and adaptability of networks.

Here are some important applications of network virtualization:

• Simulates real-world hardware and system software application testing
• Integrates numerous physical networks into a single network or separates a single physical network into several analytical networks
• Enables users to deploy business applications more quickly, resulting in faster time-to-market (TTM)
• Simulates links between applications, services, dependencies, and end users for software testing in application performance engineering

How does network virtualization work?

Network virtualization is based on dividing the roles of traditional Internet Service Providers' (ISPs') into two autonomous entities: infrastructure providers, who maintain the physical infrastructure, and service providers, who develop virtual networks by gathering resources from multiple infrastructure providers and providing end-to-end services. In such an environment, deploying coexisting heterogeneous network designs free from the fundamental constraints of the present internet will flourish.

Network virtualization separates network services from the physical infrastructure and enables virtual network deployment over an entire network. It allows users to programmatically create, provision, and manage networks entirely in software while retaining the underlying physical network as a packet-forwarding backplane.

Security and network services are deployed to hypervisors and attached to individual VMs based on networking and security policies established for each linked application. When a VM is transferred to a new host, it takes its networking and security services with it. When new VMs are generated to scale an application, the required rules are also applied dynamically to those VMs.

A hypervisor is a software component that manages virtual machines. It acts as a bridge between the virtual machine and the underlying physical hardware, ensuring that each has access to the physical resources needed to run. It also guarantees that the VMs do not interact with one another by taking up storage space or computing cycles.

A virtual network is like a virtual machine, except that it provides logical network services instead of computing services to the workloads. Logical network services include logical switching, logical routing, logical firewalling, logical load balancing, and logical virtual private network (VPN) services.

There are two fundamental components of network virtualization: link virtualization and node virtualization. Link virtualization allows several virtual links to be sent over a single physical link. A virtual connection is frequently identified explicitly by a tag but can also be recognized implicitly by a time slot or wavelength. A notable example is the wide variety of standard link virtualization mechanisms available in today's internet (e.g., ATM, Ethernet 802.1q, MPLS).

The segregation and division of hardware resources are the basis for node virtualization. A substrate node's physical resources (CPU, memory, storage capacity, and connection bandwidth) are divided into slices. Each slice is assigned to a virtual node according to set criteria. Recent advancements in operating system virtualization have allowed for substantial performance improvements.

Types of network virtualization

Understanding the different types of network virtualization can help you decide which solution works best for your business. The solutions are not mutually exclusive, and many organizations use a combination of network virtualization solutions.

There are two main types of network virtualization:

1. Internal network virtualization: It's designed to use software containers to replicate the functionality of a single system. This type of virtualization improves the overall efficiency of a single system by isolating services to separate containers and pseudo interfaces.
2. External network virtualization: It combines multiple local networks into a virtual network to improve network efficiency. The objective is to increase the efficiency of a corporate bus network or data center. VLAN and the network switch are the two primary components of an external virtual network.

SDN vs. network virtualization

As a result of advances in data center technologies and virtualization, there has been an explosion of new network ideas and vocabulary in recent years. Terms such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization are frequently used in technical presentations, vendor marketing materials, and blogs. Still, many networking professionals have only a vague idea of what these phrases signify and how they relate to one another.

Software-defined networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) typically refers to decoupling the control functions of a data network from the packet routing functions. SDN is all about how software communicates with hardware – it's essentially a next-generation network management solution. SDN doesn’t virtualize all networking operations and components, although it centralizes administration and allows users to operate network switches and routers through software.

Put another way, SDN doesn’t allow you to run the entire network in software. The infrastructure's driving elements are still the network devices. SDN makes networks programmable by separating the control plane (which tells the network where to transmit data) from the data plane (sends packets to specific targets). It’s based on switches configured via an SDN controller leveraging an industry-standard open-source control protocol like OpenFlow.

So why are these functions separated? Currently, three primary arguments are being pushed by various solution sets.

1. Separating hardware and software allows suppliers with expertise in each component to bring successful products to market in an autonomous, compatible manner. As a result, end customers can choose the optimal set of hardware and software for their objectives. Not all SDN use cases need separately designed hardware and software, although the practice is on the rise. Therefore, network software gains in value as hardware makers focus on lowering the cost of physical components.
2. The separation of networking software and hardware allows centralizing the control plane while distributing the forwarding plane over multiple physical network switches. This enables users to set up, monitor, troubleshoot, and automate a massive network made up of many separate hardware components as a single network. The control plane can, therefore, enable various forwarding behaviors and broader, more precise traffic flow management.
3. The term SDN is frequently associated with the concept of network programmability, which refers to the use of indigenous or professional tools that can interact directly with the software-based control plane to influence its configuration and behavior. By integrating application programming interfaces (APIs) into the SDN network, network management software, provisioning tools, and scripts gain a single point of interaction with the network, which can significantly improve their effectiveness.

Network virtualization

Network virtualization entirely decouples the underlying hardware and network resources. This enables network teams to replicate all network components and functionalities in software. Scalability, fault isolation, security, and network abstraction are all reasons this separation is usually desired. The decoupling of resources is often achieved by using technologies that produce virtual instances of a physical device, such as load balancers or firewall appliances, which allow partitioning a physical device into numerous virtual devices for various purposes.

Virtual machines can be moved from one logical domain to another without rewiring domain connections or reconfiguring the network. Organizations use virtual routing and forwarding instances (VRFs) to virtualize and isolate IP routing tables and route services on routers and layer 3 switches. Ethernet switches allow VLANs to provide layer 2 route isolation and divide a single physical switch's broadcast domain into numerous logical ones.

These methods are frequently used in tandem to offer a distinct network environment for an application, business unit, or data center tenant. Path separation and network virtualization can also be achieved by using newer overlay network technologies such as virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) and network virtualization using generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE).

This approach offers containerization, segregation, and scalability. Flow manipulation using SDN technologies such as OpenFlow is another method of route separation. Each of these network virtualization approaches has advantages and disadvantages, and there are times when they complement or clash with one another.

Benefits of network virtualization

By automating and simplifying many of the operations involved in maintaining a data center network and managing networking and security on cloud, network virtualization enables businesses to accomplish significant gains in speed, agility, and security.

Here are some of the most critical advantages of network virtualization.

Increased flexibility

Network virtualization shifts intelligence away from specialized hardware and toward flexible software, increasing IT and business agility. This is known as abstraction. A hypervisor replicates network functions in software using network virtualization. Businesses can construct any combination of virtualized services to create a unique virtual network in seconds because everything is in software. This degree of adaptability is one of the main advantages of SDDCs and one of the main justifications for network virtualization.

Enhanced network security

Network virtualization improves security by serving as the basic unit for micro-segmentation (the use of fine-grained rules and network management to enable data center security). Micro-segmentation enables businesses to shrink wrap security around any workload, preventing the spread of server-to-server attacks. It isolates networks by default, which implies that workloads on two unconnected networks cannot communicate with each other.

When users build virtual networks, they stay separated from each other until someone tries to link them. No physical subnets, VLANs, access control lists (ACLs), or firewall rules are necessary for this isolation. Virtual networks are separated from the actual network beneath them. This isolation prevents changes in one virtual network from impacting other virtual networks and safeguards the underlying physical infrastructure from attacks initiated by workloads on any of the virtual networks.

Dynamic network management

Network virtualization offers centralized control of network resources as well as dynamic provisioning and reconfiguration. Furthermore, computer resources and services can connect directly with virtual network resources. This also enables better application support, resource utilization, and efficient network traffic management.

Challenges of network virtualization

Virtualization solutions are more popular than ever. Whether hardware, software, or hybrid virtualization topologies, network managers are busy implementing the next generation of technologies to meet growing demands for greater transparency and control over IT environments that host their business-critical applications.

Before shifting to a network virtualization software, it's essential to understand some of the challenges associated with it.

Steep learning curve

IT teams must be trained and certified in dealing with virtualization and virtual networks. The system is not the same as a regular system; it’s just virtual. It must be managed, developed, and maintained differently, and businesses need to have access to those skill sets before they begin virtualizing their existing networking infrastructure.

Virtual network management

Because of the way they’re built, virtual machines and containers increase endpoint complexity. Since administrators can move VMs between servers, it becomes more difficult to locate data. A network administrator has many endpoints under their control as one server can host several VMs or containers.

Bandwidth and latency can become a concern if the infrastructure lacks the orchestration needed to route traffic effectively. Despite its complexity, virtualization simplifies future network modifications. However, this might be difficult if an organization lacks the necessary people and software.

Make your network more flexible, scalable, and secure

Network virtualization and cloud computing are the technologies of the future. These new principles will be applied to more businesses as CIOs continue to have greater involvement in organizational systems. As customer demand for real-time services grows, companies will have no option but to consider network virtualization as the right approach for taking their networks to the next level.

The future of networking has arrived. Learn how SD-WAN is transforming the way organizations link remote offices and employees to securely deliver apps and information.