#Network virtualization software for mac how to#
This is where hardware gateways enter the picture.įortunately, there is an emerging class of hardware switch that is readily adaptable to this gateway use case. Ideally you’d like a high-density and high-throughput device that could bridge the traffic to and from the physical servers into the logical networks.
#Network virtualization software for mac full#
Say you had a rack (or more) full of bare-metal database servers and you wanted to connect them to logical networks containing VMs running application and web tiers for multi-tier applications. Software gateways are a great solution for moderate amounts of physical-to-virtual traffic, but there are inevitably some scenarios where the volume of traffic is too high for a single x86-based appliance, or even a handful of them. The basic functionality is similar enough: the gateway maps traffic from a physical port (in this case, a port connected to a WAN router rather than a server) to logical networks, and vice versa. This is illustrated below.Īn NSX gateway connects physical devices to virtual networksĪs an aside, these gateways also address another common use case: traffic that enters and leaves the data center, or “north-south” traffic. Under the control of the NSX controller, it maps physical ports, and VLANs on those ports, to logical networks, so that any physical device can participate in a given logical network, communicating with the VMs that are also connected to that logical network. It runs on standard x86 hardware and contains an instance of Open vSwitch. One class of gateway that we’ve been using for a while is a software appliance. Our solution to this issue was to develop gateway capabilities that allow physical devices to be connected to virtual networks. How do we accommodate these bare-metal workloads in virtualized networks if there is no vswitch sitting inside the machine? highly latency-sensitive applications), or just because there are users of the data center who haven’t felt the need to virtualize. Sometimes they are present because they run software that is not easily virtualized, or because of performance concerns (e.g. “Bare metal” servers - that is, unvirtualized, or physical machines - are a fact of life in most real data centers. In typical data centers, however, not every machine is virtualized. This is the approach taken by VMware (and by Nicira before we were part of VMware) to enable network virtualization, and it forms the basis for our current deployments. Because the vswitch is the first hop in the data path for every packet that enters or leaves a VM, it’s the natural place to implement the data plane for network virtualization. And the servers are themselves virtualized, providing the ideal insertion point for network virtualization: the vswitch (virtual switch). Servers are interconnected by a physical network that already meets the basic requirements for network virtualization: providing IP connectivity between the physical servers.
In a typical data center, the necessary infrastructure is already in place.
One factor that has facilitated the adoption of network virtualization is the ease with which it can be incrementally deployed. Network virtualization, as others have noted, is now well past the hype stage and in serious production deployments.
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