Improving Network Troubleshooting using Virtualization

Diagnosing problems, deploying new services, testing protocol interactions, or validating network configurations are hard problems in today’s Internet. This paper proposes to leverage the concept of Network Virtualization to overcome such problems: (1) Monitoring VNets can be created on demand along side any production network to enable network-wide monitoring in a robust and cost-efficient manner; (2) Shadow VNets enable troubleshooting as well as safe upgrades to both the software components and their configurations. Both approaches build on the agility and isolation properties of the underlying virtualized infrastructure. Neither requires changes to the physical or logical structure of the production network. Thus, they have the potential to substantially ease network operation and improve resilience against mistakes