Cisco Data Center Fundamentals

Chapter 7

Network Virtualization

Network virtualization is a method of combining the available resources in a network to consolidate multiple physical networks and making them operate as single or multiple independent networks called virtual networks. Once the virtual networks are created, the hardware-based physical network is then only responsible for forwarding packets while the virtual network is used to deploy and manage network services. In other words, network virtualization is the abstraction of network resources that were traditionally delivered in hardware to software.

In this chapter, we will discuss overlay network protocols such as Network Virtualization using GRE (NVGRE), Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), and VXLAN ...