Picking right abstrations for your Network Virtualisation solution

Intro

In my travels around the internets, I got increasingly frustrated by the fact that most descriptions of SDN and network virtualisation solutions dive right down into the specifics of how stuff works. While I’m all for the details, I feel that there is an opportunity here to step back a bit and talk about the abstractions, which is what the end-user will see and deal with. For this post, (and yes, by association) I will talk about the abstractions used by perhaps the most mature network virtualisation solution on the market today.

And yes, this means that I won’t be talking about how that stuff works. I promise. 🙂

Update 4 Aug: Post lightly edited for clarity based on great input from T. Sridhar – Thank You!

Network Virtualisation and visibility of the lower layers

This isn’t much of the blog post, but more of a link to a fairly solid discussion that’s happening in the comments section of a blog post @jonisick recently wrote:

What Network Virtualization Isn’t

The premise of the discussion I think boils down to a bit of a disconnect in points of view of the proponents of Network Virtualisation and those who are trying to understand what introducing NV into their traditional switched/routed DC network environments will do to the operational complexity.

Anyway, head over to the Joe’s blog linked above for the full scoop, and don’t miss the comments.

TL;DR for the impatient: I believe that we need to sort out some kind of OAM at the points where NV platform consumes underlay IP transport services. I don’t know how it is going to shape up, but believe that this is a very important point that deserves a lot more attention than I’ve seen so far.