Starting from the mainframe days, server virtualization has a long history. However, today's data centers use virtualization features to abstract physical hardware, which would be a pool of resources such as CPU, storage, and memory, to the end users in the form of virtual machines. The easiest way to ensure server resource utilization is improved is through virtualization techniques. Server virtualization success has been hailed as a transformational event in data centers primarily because a single physical machine can run multiple operating systems and each operating system can be managed like a dedicated physical machine. This is a very simple but highly powerful solution. There are different types of virtualization, such as server, storage, application, desktop, and the industry's newest buzzword is network virtualization. Network virtualization has been on the market for a long time. VLANs, VPNs, MPLS, VPLS, and VSS are all widely used examples of network virtualization. If you have worked in a data center, you would agree that networking is always challenging to work with. Network architects are forced to perform manual configuration, which results in configuring VLANs, ACLs, routing, firewall rules, QoS, load balancing, and so on. The drawback for this model is complex and slow, and in a dynamic cloud environment, the complexity would increase.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: