Most of us are familiar with routers. The little black boxes sitting in the corner of our home or office with messy wires sticking out.
What is not common knowledge is that routers come in many shapes & sizes. Home Wi-Fi routers are good for a small number of devices and large enterprise routers that serve thousands of users. Costs also vary significantly with home routers costing a few dollars while enterprise models run into the thousands.
No matter which category of router you fall in, it’s always hard to differentiate from the myriad choices. This is where virtual routers come in, with no hardware purchase and costing next to nothing.
What are virtual routers?
Virtual routers are software routers that use a normal PC (or server) to do their job.
With the advent of software-defined networking (SDN), many functions of the modern enterprise are being virtualized to save cost and vendor lock-in. This is also referred to as NFV or network function virtualization. In simple terms, functions performed by dedicated networking devices are now performed by software running on commercial-off-the-shelf servers (COTS).
The VSR
Inventum’s VSR is a virtual router that can replace any hardware router. The VSR software automatically detects the PC hardware and sets it up to function as a router. Connect your Internet & LAN to the relevant ports of the PC and voila!
Performance
The performance of your virtual router really depends on your PC hardware. Depending on the number of CPU cores, memory and network cards virtual routers can easily handle multi-gigabit traffic. Advances from Intel® in multi-core processors and the DPDK framework have enabled network fast paths on commodity servers.
Inventum has combined these developments with its own optimized software to build virtual routers that can deliver millions of packets per second (mpps) on Intel® Atom® & Xeon® processors.
Go Virtual
If you haven’t yet dabbled with network function virtualization (NFV) the virtual router may be the first thing to try.
Fire up a machine on the cloud or use a hypervisor on-prem, the virtual router can address every use case that a physical router can. No lock-in to proprietary hardware and no expensive maintenance contracts.
Download and try the VSR today!
