Today's data centers include multiple physical servers hosting several virtual machines (VMs) that are connected by a network fabric. Provisioning networking for VMs in a data center is a challenge for administrators, as it includes virtual networking between VMs, managing the MAC address and IP address, and administering VLANs and VXLANs. The additional challenge apart from ensuring internal and external network connectivity for VMs is to provision and enforce service-level agreements (SLAs) for the VMs and applications within VMs. These SLAs include bandwidth limits and priorities. Data center administrators also need to provide isolation between multiple tenants sharing a common network infrastructure.
To meet these requirements, Oracle Solaris network virtualization capabilities enable administrators to manage virtual switches across a data center. The virtual switches are exposed as first-class operating system abstractions. These virtual switches, also known as elastic virtual switches, span multiple physical servers and enable system administrators to manage them as a single virtual switch.