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Virtualization Trends Series: Storage Virtualization and Data Protection: Part 6
Here we are in part 7 of the Virtualization Trends series. In the realm of IT, innovation and adaptation are the driving forces that shape the future. Over the years, one major advancement that has revolutionized SDDCs is network virtualization. With its ability to decouple network resources from their underlying physical infrastructure, network virtualization has ushered in a new era of flexibility, scalability, and efficiency.
At the forefront of this transformative movement stands VMware NSX (formerly Nicira NVP), a pioneering solution that has emerged as a game-changer in the realm of network virtualization. By leveraging the power of software-defined networking (SDN), VMware NSX enables organizations to create, provision, and manage virtual networks effortlessly and across sites. But NSX is not alone in this dynamic landscape; it faces competition from other formidable players who are also reshaping this landscape.
Traditional networking challenges
Traditional networking being characterized by rigid and hardware-dependent infrastructure has long posed challenges for organizations seeking agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. In this chapter, we delve into the challenges that SDN solutions address and how VMware NSX-T specifically tackles these obstacles head-on.
Complexity and Provisioning Bottlenecks
One of the key challenges in traditional networking is the complexity involved in managing and provisioning network resources. If you are a System administrator working in a medium sized or large organization, chances are you had to request firewall ports, VLANs and other networking resources to your networking team at some point, and perhaps ended up having to wait several days to get it depending on processes. These things can add up and cause significant delays when working on a project or even a simple implementation.
Configuring and deploying physical networking devices can be time-consuming, error-prone, and often requires specialized expertise. SDN solutions like VMware NSX-T overcome these challenges by decoupling network services from the underlying hardware infrastructure. With NSX-T, network provisioning becomes a streamlined and automated process, enabling organizations to rapidly create and manage virtual networks with ease. The centralized management and policy-driven approach eliminate manual configurations, reducing the risk of errors and freeing up valuable time for network administrators.
Network Agility and Scalability
Scaling up or down to accommodate changing business needs can be a cumbersome and resource-intensive task with traditional networking. Adding new hardware devices or reconfiguring network settings can lead to downtime and disruptions which can be costly to the business. Network virtualization improves agility and scalability by abstracting the network control plane from the physical infrastructure. With NSX-T’s software-defined approach, administrators can dynamically allocate and reallocate network resources as needed, facilitating rapid scaling and ensuring that the network can adapt to changing demands in a seamless and efficient manner.
Security and Micro-segmentation
Network security is obviously a paramount concern in today’s digital landscape. Traditional perimeter-based security models (north-south) are insufficient in protecting against sophisticated cyber threats that can traverse the network undetected. And needless to say that implementing micro segmentation (east-west/per workload) with a traditional architecture would scare any sane network administrator off.
Network virtualization introduces the concept of micro-segmentation. By implementing fine-grained security policies at the virtual machine (VM) level, NSX-T enables organizations to create secure zones within the network. This approach limits lateral movement of threats, reducing the attack surface and enhancing overall security posture. NSX-T’s distributed firewalling capabilities provide granular control and visibility, allowing organizations to enforce security policies consistently across the entire network infrastructure. The firewall operates on the host level, avoiding needless network traffic that would otherwise get dropped anyway.
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Deployments
As you probably know, multi-cloud is among every big tech company’s priority list now. Subscription and consumption-based models bringing recurrent revenue are taking over upfront investments of hardware and licenses in their strategies.
As a result, networking across diverse environments can become complex, fragmented and complicated to navigate. In order to address these challenges, Software Defined Networking established itself as the way forward when it comes to complex connectivity and security scenarios. Among other capabilities, virtualized networking offers the possibility to extend layer 2 networks over layer 3. This has the benefit of avoiding stretching VLANs and still maintain identical subnets across sites (more on this in the next chapter). It enables seamless connectivity and consistent policy enforcement across private data centers and public cloud platforms.
As a result, it becomes somewhat easy to connect workloads running in your private SDDC with others running in public cloud provider.
VMware NSX-T’s integration with leading cloud providers facilitates workload mobility and simplifies network management in hybrid deployments. With NSX-T, organizations can achieve a unified networking fabric across their entire infrastructure, ensuring consistent security, performance, and operational efficiency.
Networking challenges of multi-site environments
Many organizations require to have at least 2 locations where they can run their workloads. In fact, apart from small local businesses, almost all companies have this requirement. This is what we also call disaster recovery (DR). A DR lets you restart your machines in a different location should there be a partial or total outage in one site. Other companies running highly critical workloads will not even tolerate the time it takes to restore the service (RTO) and will require both sites to run as one. Meaning, the networks where the virtual machines are connected must be accessible in both locations.
Stretched VLANs
In the past, many IT departments decided to go the cheap route and span the VLANs across sites directly on switches linked with a dark fibre. While this might sound like a smart idea, it is not.
Stretching a VLAN means stretching the broadcast domain as well, so if something goes wrong in one site, it could take down the whole VLAN in both sites. A single point of failure or network misconfiguration in one site can potentially affect the entire stretched VLAN network, resulting in widespread service interruptions.
How will ingress and egress traffic be handled? If the default gateway only lives in one site, it means that all workloads running in the other site will have to cross the inter-site link (ISL), resulting in what is called hair pinning events.
It becomes more challenging to enforce consistent security policies, segment networks, and isolate traffic effectively. The risk of unauthorized access, lateral movement of threats, and potential compliance violations increases when the Layer 2 domain spans multiple sites.
Re-IP
Now that we know that stretching VLANs is not advised, why not route unique subnets in each site to break the broadcast domain? This is indeed a safer option but it will make it impossible to achieve active-active datacenters. It also means, in the event of a disaster recovery invocation, a mechanism to re-IP the virtual machine that has been restored is required.
While this might (usually isn’t) be smooth sailing if all your workloads rely on DNS names, there are always a bunch of special snowflakes with a hardcoded IP somewhere that will break.
Virtualized networking
Software defined networking addresses both issues by levering vxlan or geneve protocols to connect workloads on the same layer 2 subnet, while being separated by a layer 3 router. This is achieved by adding another layer of metadata to the networking frames to identify which overlay network the interface belongs in which is interpreted by SDN components involved in the solutions (e.g., Edge gateway and ESXi agents in VMware NSX-T).
Containers connectivity with service mesh
While we talk a lot about virtual machines networking here, containers (a.k.a. modern apps) also benefit from network virtualization. In the world of containerized applications, ensuring seamless connectivity, robust security, and efficient communication between microservices can be a daunting task.
Service mesh is a powerful architectural pattern designed to address the complexities of container networking. Service mesh and virtualized networking share common principles and objectives as they both aim to abstract and decouple the underlying network infrastructure and providing a layer of virtualization and control over the communication between application components.
While virtualized networking focuses on the network layer, service mesh operates at the application layer, enabling fine-grained control, observability, and management of interactions between microservices within a containerized environment.
Service mesh solutions like Istio or Linkerd automatically handle service discovery and load balancing to ensure requests are efficiently distributed across healthy instances of microservices. They also provide sophisticated traffic management capabilities, including request routing, traffic splitting, and fault tolerance mechanisms.
Service mesh bridges the gap between the complexities of containerized networking and the benefits of virtualized networking. With enhanced control, scalability, flexibility, and security, service mesh mutates the way microservices communicate within containerized environments. As the adoption of containerization continues to rise, service mesh emerges as a critical tool in building resilient, secure, and manageable containerized applications.
Conclusion
SDN solutions like VMware NSX-T have revolutionized the networking landscape by addressing the challenges that have long plagued traditional networking approaches and offering incredible flexibility to Network admins. By enabling network virtualization, automation, agility, and enhanced security, SDN empowers organizations to break free from the limitations of hardware-centric networks become more agile when it comes to architecture and operations.
As businesses continue to evolve and embrace digital transformation, SDN solutions like NSX-T will play a pivotal role in building robust, scalable, and secure networks that can meet the demands of the modern era.
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