Creating (spinning up) VMs can be very interesting and a bit exciting, especially, if your duties are similar to those of a virtualization or cloud engineer. However, as aspiring network professionals, we must not forget that our network infrastructure also needs to be able to support a high amount of traffic, scalability, fault-tolerance, and redundancy. We previously mentioned that one of the main benefits of virtualizing servers is being able to reduce the physical storage space for the equipment and save on purchasing dedicated appliances. This concept also applies to networking equipment such as switches, firewalls, routers, and so on.

In this section, we will discuss the concepts of using virtual networking components.