Virtualization on the platform depends on the capabilities of the physical substrate. Newer devices are most likely going to have virtualization capabilities while most legacy devices will have to be emulated.

Proxy Virtualization

In order to create virtual instances of devices that don’t natively support network element virtualization, virtual devices are created and run inside a virtual machine (VM) to provide the isolated view and necessary interactivity for the users. As shown in the figure below, these virtual devices  create a “Fully Virtualized” representation of the device which communicates with the platform.

We currently only support a limited number of legacy network elements. You may Contact Us in order to have the element support or you can do the device driver yourself and submit it for our approval process. We will be working even more with vendors to increase the number of supported elements.

Native Virtualization

Many newer devices from vendors support native virtualization. In this case the virtual infrastructure is built by creating the appropriate instances directly on the physical hardware. As such the virtual device will behave exactly like the original vendor device.

 

Hybrid Virtualization

While native virtualization can be used on newer devices. In many cases this will be vendor specific instances which makes it hard to managed unified virtual infrastructures as most n. This is why the default virtualization techniques even for the devices that support virtualization natively  is to deploy a proxy for the virtual device instances. This insures that communication and management is exactly the same across the different hardware vendor solutions.