Читать книгу VMware Software-Defined Storage - Martin Hosken - Страница 8

Traditional physical network architectures can no longer scale sufficiently to meet the requirements of large enterprises and cloud service providers. This has come about as the daily operational management of networks is typically the most time-consuming aspect in the process of provisioning new virtual workloads. Software-defined networking helps to overcome this problem by providing networking to virtual environments, which allows network administrators to manage network services through an abstracted higher-level functionality.

As with all of the components that make up the SDDC model, the primary aim is to provide a simplified and more efficient mechanism to operationalize the virtual data-center platform. Through the use of software-defined networking, the majority of the time spent provisioning and configuring individual network components in the infrastructure can be performed programmatically, in a virtualized network environment. This approach allows network administrators to get around this inflexibility of having to pre-provision and configure physical networks, which has proved to be a major constraint to the development of cloud platforms.

In a software-defined networking architecture, the control and data planes are decoupled from one another, and the underlying physical network infrastructure is abstracted from the applications. As a result, enterprises and cloud service providers obtain unprecedented programmability, automation, and network control. This enables them to build highly scalable, flexible networks with cloud agility, which can easily adapt to changing business needs by

• Providing centralized management and control of networking devices from multiple vendors.

• Improving automation and management agility by employing common application program interfaces (APIs) to abstract the underlying networking from the orchestration and provisioning processes, without the need to configure individual devices.

• Increasing network reliability and security as a result of centralized and automated management of the network devices, which provides this unified security policy enforcement model, which in turn reduces configuration errors.

• Providing more-granular network control, with the ability to apply a wide range of policies at the session, user, device, or application level.

NSX is VMware’s software-defined networking platform, which enables this approach to be taken through an integrated stack of technologies. These include the NSX Controller, NSX vSwitch, NSX API, vCenter Server, and NSX Manager. By using these components, NSX can create layer 2 logical switches, which are associated with logical routers, both north/south and east/west firewalling, load balancers, security policies, VPNs, and much more.