11. Virtualizing Appliances

To this point in the book, we have mostly focused on the virtualization of servers and the awesome provisioning speed, flexibility, and scalability it affords. This is all true, of course, but we’ve also been looking at this in isolation. That is to say that we’ve been looking at this in terms of virtual machines (VMs) being spun up and moving around within a data center without much regard for how this might impact communication with the outside world, or more precisely how this impacts the services and applications that are communicating.

Application communication is controlled at Layers 4 through 7 of the OSI model—the framework that describes how networking devices and applications communicate with each other. ...

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