Introduction to Virtualized Networking

Let's start with the basics: what is server virtualization, what are hypervisors, what are containers, and how is Infrastructure-as-a-Service implemented.

Virtual machines running within a hypervisor have to communicate with their clients through an outside network, and be able to access storage.

This section describes common mechanisms used to implement virtual networking and virtualized storage, including virtual disks, virtual switches, and multi-tenant isolation or security zones.

This section covers a plethora of advanced topics including distributed virtual switches, SR-IOV, macvlan and ipvlan Linux interfaces, eBPF and XDP, and smart NICs.

VLANs were commonly used to implement virtual networks, resulting in brittle environment using end-to-end bridging across whole data centers. Modern designs use MAC-over-IP encapsulations (overlay virtual networking). This section describes the basics of VLAN scaling and overlay virtual networking, you'll find more details in other network virtualization webinars.

You shouldn't use traditional hardware-based network appliances if you want to give the application developers the ability to deploy application stacks on demand. Modern cloud infrastructures therefore offer firewalling-as-a-service and loadbalancing-as-a-service.

These services are commonly implemented with virtual appliances and distributed in-kernel firewalls. Both technologies are described in this section.