As you just learned, NFV is nothing but having a virtual platform to serve network functions such as firewall, IPS, and load balancing. But what is the role of SDN and OpenDaylight in NFV?
To answer this question, let's go back to traditional networking and consider an example scenario.
We have a data center Point Of Delivery (POD), or in simpler terms, a couple of racks with network connectivity with a farm of web servers and database server; this is for a sample CRM application. We would like to route the incoming traffic through a firewall and then to a load balancer in order to distribute the traffic to multiple web servers. Communication between web servers and the database must pass over the firewall. Finally, the return traffic should go from the load balancer (not directly from the servers) back to the original client.
Assuming a legacy network and standard hardware appliances (firewall and load balancer), we do need to implement this solution as...