A Survey of Virtual Network Architectures

With the storage needs of the world increasing, especially with the growth of cloud computing, data centers are being utilized more than ever. The increasing need of storage has led to more use of virtualization to help intra and inter data center communications. The virtualization of physical networks is used to help achieve this goal, but with the creation of Virtual Networks, systems must be designed to create, manage, and secure them. A Virtual Network Architecture is the system design for creating and maintaining virtual network components and the resulting networks they create. Different companies design different Virtual Network Architectures, with each having potentially different use cases. In designing a Virtual Network Architecture, there are many questions about how different aspects of the system work. Questions such as how do network nodes communicate with the management system, how are the data and control planes implemented, etc. In this report, we summarize and compare the Virtual Network Architectures from different companies. These architectures are used for creating and managing Virtual Networks, some with different use cases, but most with the purpose of creating and managing virtualized networks in large data centers