Like many
network professionals, I feel the need to navigate through the frontal tide of
confusion, and grasp the essence of change. Initially, as I swallowed a lot of
information, I was easily confused and swayed one way or another. Let’s face
it, most materials out there are vendor affiliated, which is inherently partial
and biased. But over time, a clearer picture has emerged. However pure and
simple, it has given me consistency and continuation in the thought process. I
hope it will help you establish your own framework as well, and chart your own
course forward.
Virtual Networking – the beginning of
change
Let’s start
with why, why the change, why now. To me, change is not about doing what
networking already does, in a different way. Fundamentally, networking enables
communication and supports compute, which enables applications. Compute has
gone through its own revolution which is virtualization. Compute virtualization
brought networking into the hypervisor environment, thus creating an overlap
between two previously separate domains. This rudimentary form of virtual
networking can be seen in the form of current generation virtual switches.
