Virtual Switching

In the pre-server virtualization days, all traffic forwarding functions across the data center network were carried out by the physical switching infrastructure. Servers were attached through either IEEE 802.1Q VLAN trunks or single-VLAN switch ports sending their network traffic toward the data center access layer switches, which in turn forwarded it to its destination. With the advent of server virtualization, servers were turned into software constructs running on top of the shim hypervisor layer running in turn on top of the bare metal physical server hardware. This introduced a challenge of handling virtual machine network traffic.

A solution came in the form of virtual switches deployed at the server virtualization layer. ...

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