Introduction

Completed

Azure Stack HCI facilitates the design and deployment of Software Defined Networking (SDN) infrastructure.

Example scenario

Suppose you work at a large, US-based financial services company. In its own datacenters, the company develops and hosts highly specialized, proprietary commercial applications for its customers.

As part of modernizing its technology, the company started deploying Azure Stack HCI across its on-premises locations. This change has accelerated datacenter consolidation and enhanced the agility of compute workloads. It's also helped minimize the dependency on storage area networks (SANs) that are expensive and complex to manage.

However, your company continues to struggle with maintaining an elaborate network infrastructure. The network comprises a large number of devices from different vendors, with hundreds of virtual local area networks (VLANs). The network team finds it increasingly difficult to implement the degree of isolation and resiliency required to accommodate the needs of customers and to satisfy regulatory requirements.

To address these challenges, you decide to explore the option of using the Software Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities of Azure Stack HCI. Your goal is to determine whether you could supplement the existing physical network infrastructure and its VLANs by using dynamically scalable and modifiable virtualized networking devices. You're also interested in the possibility of integrating the entire networking environment to allow for its centralized management.

You realize that to accomplish your goal, your solution must be able to provide a sufficient level of high availability and security. The viability of your solution is also contingent on its support for software-defined switching, routing, load balancing, and filtering of network traffic.

To start, you deployed an Azure Stack HCI unit into your proof-of-concept environment. Now, it’s time to research and evaluate the core SDN functionality to determine the extent to which it could help you improve the resiliency, agility, security, and manageability of your network infrastructure.

What will we be doing?

In this module, we explore the architecture and core capabilities of SDN on Azure Stack HCI. We also review a couple of demonstrations illustrating a sample deployment of SDN on Azure Stack HCI.

What is the main goal?

By the end of this module, you can describe the architecture and core benefits of SDN on Azure Stack HCI, and deploy SDN on Azure Stack HCI. This information prepares you for the tasks of implementing SDN components such as Datacenter Firewall and Software Load Balancer.