I went to the Future of Virtualized Networks with Howie Xu this morning and I thought I was going to hear about some new amazing technology, from the vFabric buzz. Not so much. His first sentence was this isn't a product or even a roadmap. It's just a vision.
Virtualized networks are still in development and is going to continually be a journey. Its a big push to put networking guys into the virtual infrastructure and continue to converge the two.
VMware sees it's current networking journey to go from the managed vSwitch to the vNetwork Distributed Switch and on to the "Distributed
Virtual Network". More companies are going to start playing the Nexus 1000V game and integrating more with vSphere.
The journey has 4 key concepts:
Anything. Being able to put whatever you want out there
Anytime. Spinning up and done workload instantaneously with end to end Layer 2 to 7 networking
Anywhere. Deploying workloads where there is computing capacity without network constraint
Any Scale. Scaling workloads up and down, horizontally, vertically, easily and economically
A distributed virtual network isn't layer 2 , but takes care all the way to layer 7 it will help bridge the hybrid cloud. You want the network to be transparent as possible.
The vision for vChassis.
Platform for "network infrastructure programmability" It enables to scale out and be a management framework. Now we can allow customers to plug in and take advantage of it. It's more than just 1 API but it's an end to end solution.
I'll let some of the pictures do the talking.
A lot of this is looking at a flat layer 2 foundation. It's not an easy problem to solve when scaling because all shops use internal addressing, so how is it solved when you take your infrastructure to the cloud. Think of all of this as a networking OS.
FOLLOW UP: Howie Xu has published a new article called vNetwork Journey that summarizes his talk at VMworld. http://blogs.vmware.com/networking/2010/09/vnetwork-journey.html