Midokura Provides More Network Virtualization Visibility

The Five Dos and Don’ts of Virtualization

While it’s taken some time, network virtualization is now quickly becoming fairly common. The challenge now is finding a way to apply network virtualization to support heterogeneous IT environments. To meet that challenge, Midokura created Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM), an instance of a virtual network that can be deployed in an OpenStack environment while still being integrated with existing VMware vSphere technologies.

With the release of MEM 5.0, Midokura is now looking to provide more visibility into virtual networks via the addition of visualization tools that make it easier to track network flows and monitor bandwidth consumptions using, for example, port mirrors.

In general, Susan Wu, director of technical marketing for Midokura says, once organizations embrace OpenStack as a framework for managing new classes of application workloads, they start looking for a more robust approach to network virtualization. Not only is the network virtualization technology provided within OpenStack difficult to scale, Wu notes, but organizations need an approach to network virtualization that can also span a variety of legacy networking environments using MidoNet Gateway software.

As a foundational component for creating a software-defined network (SDN), network virtualization plays a critical role by providing a layer of abstraction above network hardware and software that makes it simpler to manage a complex IT environment. Now enterprise IT organizations are starting to leverage that layer of abstraction to fundamentally change the way those networks are managed.

Naturally, that change involves both new technologies and fundamental changes to the culture of the IT department itself. Of course, that’s a whole lot easier to accomplish when everyone involved has visibility into what’s actually occurring on the virtual networks.