30. NFV: What Happens to All the Network Appliances?

With the advent of network functions virtualization (NFV), many of the purpose-built network appliances are likely to go away. So, what’s going to happen to them? This is a good question, and one that this chapter will attempt to answer. However, to understand this outcome of NFV, we must first consider what the goals are, for they differ from server and application virtualization. Let’s consider first why server and application virtualization was such a success.

How Network Appliances Are Different

The great advantage of virtualizing applications is that administrators could host applications as virtual machines (VMs) running on a host server. Server administrators typically installed one ...

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