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The difference and relation between NFV and SDN

In the "cloud, big, material, intelligent" new environment has given birth to a lot of technological innovation, when it comes to NFV, many people always distinguish it from SDN and even think that NFV is SDN. In fact, there is a big difference between the two. SDN is more of an architectural innovation, such as the separation of transfer and control (the control plane is configured and issued by the SDN controller, and the transponder only does the forwarding function). The automation of the network can be realized through SDN, and the flexible scheduling of business can be better realized by using SDN to dock with the cloud platform, which will greatly reduce the workload of network managers.

NFV (Network function Virtualization), NFV originated from European operators. The essential value is that the L4-L7 layer value-added services, such as "V-FW, V-IPS, V-IDS, V-LB, V-WAF, etc.", can now be implemented on X86 servers, that is, multiple virtual machines are opened on the server and virtualization software corresponding to the value-added services is installed on the virtual machine. In this way, the hardware and software are decoupled (to put it bluntly, it used to provide value-added services in the form of hardware, but now it is done in the form of software to realize the decoupling of software and hardware). This kind of deployment is more portable (can be installed and deleted as needed), and it is more convenient to maintain and upgrade (upgrade is flexible and only needs to upgrade the software code). At the same time, this approach can eliminate the advantages of vendor locking and high cost, but NFV also has some shortcomings, such as idle resources, especially in the enterprise network.

In the process of tenant A visiting tenant B in the data center, the access traffic from tenant A to tenant B can be transferred through different value-added service NFV products according to the needs of tenants, and different NFV products form tenant service catalogs (also known as service chains). As long as you do the drainage on the corresponding NFV products as needed (the SDN controller completes the configuration related to the drainage), the traffic after coming out is the traffic detected by the NFV. SDN controller can be required to dock with related NFV products to achieve the corresponding value-added services.

SDN and NFV complement each other in the process of network automation. SDN highlights the changes in network architecture, while NFV highlights the changes in the form of value-added services. NFV is used more among operators and relatively less in enterprise network environment (operators have a large volume of business and idle resources are not easy to occur).

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