News
Emulex to Support High Performance Virtual Network Fabrics in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Environments
June 2013 by Marc Jacob
Emulex Corporation announced planned support for high performance Virtual Network Fabrics (VNFs) – virtual networks built on top of and transparently over traditional networking infrastructure – accelerating network performance in Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V environments. Based on proposed standard Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) technology, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Network Virtualization reduces the limitations of legacy data center networks by enabling flexible workload mobility inside the private, public or hybrid cloud, reducing network reconfiguration from days to minutes. The forthcoming Emulex Virtual Network Exceleration™ (VNeX) virtual network offload technology further accelerates the performance of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Network Virtualization by offloading the NVGRE header encapsulation process from the host to the network controller, providing full native network performance in a VNF network environment.
VNFs comprise three primary elements, including:
1. a data plane running an encapsulation protocol such as NVGRE;
2. hardware offloads to improve performance, such as Emulex VNeX;
3. control plane software, such as Microsoft System Center.
As software-defined networking (SDN) and associated technologies, including VNF and overlay networking, continue to develop, it is important to understand what SDN is, what the drivers are and how and where it’s being adopted. Emulex commissioned an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Book Project: “Why I/O Is Strategic – Software-defined Networking (SDN),” as part of the “Why I/O Is Strategic” education series, which outlines these areas and why I/O is strategic to SDN as a new area of programmability in SDN environments.
