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The business IT landscape is turning toward virtual teams as organizations strive for greater agility to manage shifting demands in the market. Convention network infrastructures often create complexities by falling short, minimizing scalability, flexibility, and speed of innovation. 

Many companies now look toward advancements as essential, specifically, as a driver for digital transformation success. While cloud adoption has helped, the real growth enabler lies in network virtualization software, which is reshaping the way businesses combine agility and resilience at scale. 

Network Virtualization in Cloud-First Era

Virtualization and cloud computing are both technologies that support one another. Numerous enterprises use virtualization to minimize management challenges and pool virtual network needs. They implement network virtualization software in the cloud environment to build multiple virtual networks across one physical server or other systems. 

Virtualization networking needs for cloud computing environments enable businesses to:

Efficient Resource Optimization: A diverse cloud-based network on a unified hardware system ensures that bandwidth and resource utilization will be enhanced, which can scale up network performance and cut traffic congestion. 

Network Isolation For Advanced Protection: Every network can have unique security policies and isolation that ensures malware won't impact any virtual network on the same infrastructure. 

Maximum Flexibility and Scalability: You can form virtual networks that fulfil innovative workload needs and accelerate provisioning with proactive automation and scaling on demand. 

Simplified Cloud Orchestration: As networks backed by serverless computing offer centralized control, they help simplify tasks like configuration, tracking, and troubleshooting in the cloud. 

Strengthen Disaster Recovery: Network virtualization can be replicated or shifted from one host to another on demand. With this redundancy, disaster recovery, and business continuity are optimized even if the worst happens. 

The best way to utilize the perks from network virtualization software in the cloud is to create virtual private clouds. If an organization runs operations on the public cloud, they are most likely sharing physical hardware with other clients. Therefore, by virtualizing a cloud network, you can enjoy a dedicated, isolated pool of IT assets that belongs to the enterprise and operates with its security guidelines, routing tables, subnets, and IP addresses. This helps you to control network segments and define network processes as per your needs. 

Network Virtualization Software & Software-Defined Networking

As it's mixed with one another very often, network virtualization software is not the same as software-defined networking (SDN). But there is no hard and fast rule; of course, there are some similarities as well. They are both valid advanced strategies for network management. However, some industry leaders believe that the concept of network virtualization is a subset of SDN because network virtualization software was one of its earliest use cases previously. The real difference between them is about how technologies distinguish resources and functions. 

Let's describe them separately: 

Network Virtualization Solutions

It's about abstracting network resources into a software layer to enable IT teams to create, control, and scale virtual networks on top of physical hardware configurations. IT administrators utilize network virtualization software to create multiple isolated cloud-based networks that share the same underlying physical infrastructure. Teams can add and scale these virtual networks without changing the physical hardware infrastructure. 

SDN

Software-defined networking is an approach designed to make a network more scalable and simplified to manage. SDN centralizes management by abstracting the control plane from the data forwarding function in the discrete networking devices. This architecture decouples the network control and forwarding functions, enabling the network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted for apps and network services.

Perhaps by implementing remote strategies in the control plane and abstracting it from the hardware’s data plane, SDN offers networks to be intelligible and scalable. The rationale behind separating management from data planes can be demonstrated in the following ways:

It offers clients to utilize the software and hardware as per their own choice, and using hardware with the least control functions demands less cost. 

Users can form comprehensive networks composed of different hardware devices for a wider range of packet redirecting strategies and a more precise flow of data traffic. 

Network programmability is a crucial factor of SDN, and it allows end-users to utilize third-party software and APIs to get a unified point of management or interaction across the whole network. 

Contemporary Forms of Virtual Networks

VLAN

A separate component of a physical local area network (LAN) that is virtualized to combine network nodes and/or devices on different LANs into a unified virtual network with a shared pool of networking resources. VLANs are most frequently used to optimize performance on high-traffic networks and make provisioning and updating networks fast, secure, and easy to manage. 

Network Overlays

There are multiple forms of network overlays. Perhaps VLANs are ordinary out of them, but the terminology typically reflects more complicated virtual layers that sit atop physical hardware infrastructure. Overlays enable IT teams to configure, explain, and handle the flow of data traffic without considering the physical hardware structure. 

NFV

This approach, most frequently used by mobile telecom carriers, entails the removal

of specific network functions, for instance, firewalling, routing, and load balancing, from sophisticated physical hardware and placing them on the cloud. It offers carriers to take advantage of specific functionalities without having to buy specialized hardware. 

5G Network Slicing 

These days, multiple enterprises are widely using network virtualization technology to separate physical 5G infrastructure and create virtual networks with personalized functionalities and capabilities for individual clients. 

Modernize Your VM Environment With Fortinet 

Fortinet is a leading multi-cloud security provider, enabling strong private cloud solutions with the integration of FortiGate-VM intelligent firewall. The Fortinet solutions centrally observe and manage the internal and external flow of network traffic to support organizations in addressing compliance threats. FortiGate’s wide range of solutions is available in virtual machine form factors with all the potential of physical appliances for a highly virtualized private cloud vendor management system (VMS). 

Scalable Deployment: Work seamlessly across private, public, and hybrid clouds, for instance, VMware. 

Centralized Control: Unified management through FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer for continuous security guidelines and transparency. 

Optimized Security: Scaled up to handle the flow of encrypted traffic, enabling minimal latency with powerful security. 

Intelligence & Orchestration: Implements with SDN and cloud-native guidelines enforcement and intelligent operations. 

 Achieve Virtualization Success In Business