FlowVisor: A Network Virtualization Layer

• hypervisor 2

http://archive.openflow.org/downloads/technicalreports/openflow-tr-2009-1-flowvisor.pdf

a new approach to switch virtualization in which the same hardware forwarding plane can be shared among multiple logical networks — multiple network experiments to run side-by-side with production traffic while still providing isolation and hardware forwarding speeds.

deployed to slice our own production network.

network virtualization

similar to computer virtualization, promises to improve resource allocation, permits operators to check point their network before changes, and allows competing customers to share the same equipment in a controlled and isolated fashion

The effect is that each OS believes it has its own private hardware

6.3 Preliminary Scaling Evaluation

FlowVisor trivially scales to the size of our current deployment. In terms of computation, the FlowVisor uses at most 5% CPU on a 3.0GHz Xeon.