With all the buzz about Software Defined Networking and Network Virtualization I figured I’d put a post up giving some explanation on how the network is actually “virtualized” as a resource and what controls it (the SDN controller)

As you may know now Nicira the network virtualization startup and maintainer of OpenVSwitch has been bought by VMWare for 1.26B had given precedence in the field that NV is around to stay. Other companies like BigSwitch, NEC, HP, and IBM (other as well I did not mention) are all joining the industry with their own SDN Controllers. They will all essentially do most of the same core things following the openflow spec as is keeps evolving over time.

(learn more http://www.openflow.org/wp/learnmore/ , http://www.openflow.org/documents/openflow-spec-v1.0.0.pdf, http://www.openflow.org/documents/openflow-spec-v1.1.0.pdf)

Some of the great things network virtualization, SDN and applications on top of a logical network infrastructure provides are isolation, innovation, vendor agnosticism, centralization, public / private cloud integration and much more. I hope to discuss specific NV technologies, theories and test cases.

Check out Founder  and CTO of Nicira Netoworks Martin Casado’s site http://networkheresy.com/ for a good source in specific technologies surrounding this area.

Also stop by BigSwitch’s Floodlight Controller developer and informational site for more information http://floodlight.openflowhub.org/