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The network team is being bombarded with configuration requests that can take days or weeks to handle, but luckily several approaches are emerging that promise to increase network agility, chief among them Network Virtualization (NV), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and Software Defined Networking (SDN).
The alphabet soup may seem overwhelming at first, but each of these approaches is trying to solve different subsets of the macro issue of network mobility. In this article we'll examine how NV, NFV and SDN differ and how each moves us down the path toward programmable networks.
Network Virtualization
Enterprise networking administrators can't keep up with requests for network changes. There needs to be a way to automate the network to improve IT's responsiveness to change. In this use case, we are typically trying to solve one problem: How do I move VMs across different logical domains? Network virtualization literally tries to create logical segments in an existing network by dividing the network logically at the flow level (it is similar to partitioning a hard drive).
NV is an overlay; it's a tunnel. Rather than physically connecting two domains in a network, NV creates a tunnel through the existing network to connect two domains. NV is valuable because it saves administrators from having to physically wire up each...