For almost as long as there have been packet-switched networks, there have been ideas about how to virtualize them. For example, there were early debates in the networking community about the merits of "virtual circuits" versus connectionless networks. But the concept of network virtualization has become more widespread in recent years, helped along by the rise of SDN as an enabling technology. 

Virtualization has a robust history in computer science, but there remains some confusion about precisely what the term means. Arguably this is due in part to confusion caused by colloquial usage of "virtual" as a synonym for "almost", among many other uses.

Virtual memory provides an easy example to help understand what virtualization means in computing. Virtual memory creates an abstraction of a large and private pool of memory resources, even though the underlying physical memory may be shared by many applications and users and considerably smaller than the apparent pool of virtual memory. This abstraction enables programmers to operate under the illusion that there is plenty of memory and that no-one else is using it, while under the covers the memory management system takes care of things like mapping the virtual memory to physical resources and avoiding conflict between users.

Similarly, server virtualization presents the abstraction of a virtual  machine (VM), which has all the features of a physical machine. Again, there may be many VMs supported on a single physical server, and the operating system and users on the virtual machine are happily unaware that the VM is being mapped onto physical resources.

A key point here is that virtualization of computing resources preserves the abstractions that existed before they were virtualized. This is important because it means that users of those abstractions don't need to change - they see a faithful reproduction of the thing being virtualized.

So what happens when we try to virtualize networks? We are able to present familiar abstractions to users of the virtual network, while mapping those abstractions onto the physical network in a way that insulates the user from the complexity of this mapping.

An early success for virtual networking came with the introduction of virtual private networks (VPNs), which allowed carriers to present corporate customers with the illusion that they had their own private network, even though in reality they were sharing underlying resources with many other users. One instance of this was the flavor of VPN known as MPLS VPNs, which gave each customer their own private address space and routing tables, along with control over the topology of their network, all implemented on top of a single IP network.

VPNs, however, only virtualize a few resources, notably addressing and routing tables. Network virtualization as commonly understood today goes further, virtualizing every aspect of networking. That means that a virtual network today supports all the basic abstractions of a physical network - switching, routing, firewalling, load balancing - virtualizing the entire network stack from layers two through seven. In this sense, they are analogous to the virtual machine, with its support of all the abstractions of a server: CPU, storage, I/O, etc.

Like virtual machines, virtual networks are also allowing a whole set of operational advances. They can be created rapidly under programmatic control; snapshots can be taken; networks can be cloned and migrated to entirely new locations, e.g., for disaster recovery.

There's still lots of room for growth in the virtual networking space. Modern cloud operators increasingly depend on virtual networks to automate their provisioning of services. Operators of emerging 5G networks are looking at options for virtualizing their networks.

For a more in depth discussion of this topic, we refer you to this blog post, co-authored with Martin Casado, one of the pioneers of both SDN and network virtualization.
​