Network Plus N10-007 Objective 2.4

2.4 Explain the purposes of virtualization and network storage technologies.

Virtual networking components

Virtual switch

In virtual networking, a virtual switch (vSwitch) is created to allow your virtual devices to communicate with each other as well as the physical LAN. It operates at Layer 2 (Data Link) Layer and you may see it called a bridge.

Virtual NIC

The Virtual NIC (vNIC) is the network connection for each host. vNICs connect to the vSwitch which connects them to the vLAN, vRouter or physical LAN.

Virtual router

A virtual router (vRouter) is a fully functional software version of a router. As the highest level virtual device you will probably connect to the physical LAN through it.

Virtual firewall

A virtual firewall can be placed at strategic locations within your virtual environment enabling a greater level of control.

Hypervisor

The Hypervisor or Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is the software component that contains and controls all the virtual machines and devices on a host. When installing a hypervisor be sure that your processor supports hardware virtualization. Intel-based processors use VTT and AMD uses AMD-V. Be sure these are available and running in UEFI/BIOS. Remember that all storage and memory allocated to your devices will impact the host machine performance.

screenshot of VM Resource usage
VMM – Showing resource usage.

Network storage types

NAS

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is storage that is attached directly to the network. This allows for easily accessible file storage. NAS uses file-level storage meaning that any changes to a file result in a new file being created. NAS devices appear to the network as a single device but can contain multiple drives.

SAN

A Storage Area Network Offers accessibility like a NAS with the exceptions that a SAN uses multiple identical storage devices and it is fast as you. The storage can be anywhere on the network. SAN devices use block-level file access meaning that when you need to change a value in a file, only that block of data is changed. This is faster and more efficient than file-level access where the entire file is rewritten. SAN is an extremely fault-tolerant solution and it is fast as you will see in the text that follows.

Connection types

Fibre Channel

Fibre Channel (FC) runs separately from Ethernet networks using a different architecture that maximizes data access and storage speed. This is accomplished by using fiber-optic connections and specialized Fiber Channel hardware including the Host-Bus Adapter (HBA) that connects to the Fibre Channel SAN. A conventional NIC is still used to connect to the LAN.

FCoE

FC can still be used on Ethernet networks by encapsulating the FC data in an Ethernet frame. This process is called FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and allows companies to reap much of the speed benefits of FC without the expenses involved in a pure FC deployment. Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) are used to support these connections.

iSCSI

Internet SCSI (iSCSI) operates on traditional twisted-pair Ethernet connections. ISCSI is a protocol that runs on the Transport layer and provides fast transmissions on LANs WANs, and the Internet. iSCSI runs on software installed on the clients and servers called an iSCSI initiator and provide a cost benefit by using the existing infrastructure. In some cases, a network administrator may choose to use Jumbo frames for iSCSI traffic.

InfiniBand

InfiniBand (IB) is another network architecture that enables high-speed transmissions. While being fast it does require it’s own specialized network hardware.

Jumbo frame

By default, The MTU of an ethernet frame is 1500 bytes. Some Layer 2 protocols can use larger MTUs of up to 9198 bytes called Jumbo frames. iSCSI uses Jumbo frames.

That’s it for Objective 2.4! See you at 2.5!

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