Introduction
Suppose you're a network administrator at a large, US-based, financial-services company. The company develops and hosts highly specialized, proprietary commercial applications for its customers in its own datacenters.
As part of modernizing its technology, your company has deployed Azure Stack HCI across its on-premises locations. Azure Stack HCI has accelerated datacenter consolidation, enhanced compute workload agility, and helped minimize dependency on expensive, complex storage area networks (SANs).
However, your company still struggles to maintain an elaborate network infrastructure, which has many devices from different vendors and hundreds of virtual local area networks (VLANs). It's increasingly difficult to achieve sufficient security and resiliency to satisfy customer needs and regulatory requirements.
To address these challenges, you decide to investigate the software defined networking (SDN) capabilities of Azure Stack HCI. You want to see if you can provide network traffic filtering and load balancing by using dynamically scalable and modifiable virtualized networking devices.
You've deployed an Azure Stack HCI unit including Network Controller into a proof-of-concept environment. In this learning module, you explore the SDN traffic filtering and load-balancing capabilities of Azure Stack HCI to see how they can help you improve your infrastructure security and resiliency. You also review a couple of demonstrations that illustrate a sample implementation and use of these capabilities.
By the end of this module, you can:
- Describe the architecture and core benefits of traffic filtering and load balancing with SDN on Azure Stack HCI.
- Understand the deployment process for these SDN components on Azure Stack HCI.