Explaining Network Virtualization with VMM part 1

Explaining Network Virtualization with VMM Part 1

Network virtualization in Windows Server 2012 is one of my favorites, because it’s just so technical and revolutionary for the entire industry.

I have blogged about both network virtualization in VMM SP1 (CTP2) before, and the extensible switch in Hyper-V.

It’s important to know that there’s several new features and options in System Center – Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 – BETA related to network virtualization, so I will start to blog about it now and walk through the different configuration options.

This blog post will talk about the networking Fabric.

Fabric in VMM is a layer of abstraction above your physical and virtual infrastructure that should serve the purpose of cloud computing. Fabric will contain virtualization hosts, networks and network equipment, storage, and also some additional server roles that will maintain and support the life cycle of your fabric resources.

When you are configuring and deploying a Microsoft Private Cloud, Fabric in VMM is the place to start.

Network virtualization in VMM does also has its starting point here.
A logical network in VMM can contain several sites, subnets and VLANs that represents the physical network.

Each virtualization host must be physically connected and associated to the proper logical network before you continue with network virtualization. Check this blog post I wrote earlier about networking in VMM.

A logical network must be in place as it’s the foundation for network virtualization (CA’s and PA’S), no matter what kind of network virtualization technique you are using.

Default in SP1 is NVGRE – and not IP-rewrite as in CTP2.

When you enable networking virtualization on the logical network, you can see the following in the jobs pane:

And during this modification you’ll find an interesting agent installed on your Hyper-V hosts:

 

More on this in the next post.

Now, let’s check what the Beta bits are bringing to the table.

Logical Switch

The Hyper-V Extensible Switch is dramatically changed in Windows Server 2012 (previously known as networks) and VMM fully supports and leverage its capabilities. An extensible virtual switch provides several options and configurations in a natively fashion, and does also supports ‘add-ons’ from thir-parties.

A logical switch is meant to represent a single configuration for you to apply to many or every hosts for a consistent configuration in your cloud infrastructure fabric.
Included in the logical switch is Native port profiles for uplink ports – used to define logical network definitions that should be available on every physical NIC connected to the logical switch.

Native port profiles for virtual ports – are used to define settings to the virtual switches that your VMs are connected to.

Port classifications – works as an identity to classify virtual port profiles for particular networks. So a VM can be deployed to different logical switches where the name matches based on the virtual port profiles on each switch.

More to come in the near future.

-kn