N10-009 Question 28
Single answerNetwork functions virtualization (NFV)A company is opening several small branch offices and wants to reduce the cost and delay of shipping dedicated firewall and WAN optimization appliances to each site. The network team plans to deploy these services as software on standard x86 servers at the branches and manage them centrally from the data center. Which technology best meets this requirement?
- A
Network functions virtualization (NFV)
- B
Port mirroring
- C
Link aggregation
- D
Virtual LAN (VLAN)
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is Network functions virtualization (NFV). NFV is designed to decouple network functions from proprietary hardware and run them as software-based virtual network functions on general-purpose compute platforms. This helps organizations deploy services faster, reduce hardware shipping and replacement costs, and manage distributed environments more flexibly. In real-world branch deployments, NFV is commonly used for services such as virtual firewalls, virtual routers, WAN optimization, and other edge functions. This aligns with widely accepted industry guidance from ETSI NFV architectural work, which describes network functions being implemented in software and hosted on standard hardware rather than purpose-built appliances. The other options are legitimate networking technologies, but they solve different problems: port mirroring supports monitoring, link aggregation improves bandwidth and fault tolerance, and VLANs provide logical segmentation. None of them replace dedicated network appliances with software-based network functions.
- A. Correct.
Correct. NFV virtualizes network services that traditionally ran on dedicated hardware appliances, such as firewalls, load balancers, routers, and WAN optimization devices. In this scenario, running those functions as software on commodity x86 hardware at branch sites and managing them centrally is a classic NFV use case.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Port mirroring copies traffic from one port or VLAN to another destination for monitoring or packet analysis. It does not replace hardware appliances with virtualized network services or provide centralized deployment of branch network functions.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Link aggregation combines multiple physical links into a single logical connection to increase bandwidth or provide redundancy. While useful for resiliency and throughput, it does not address the need to deploy firewall and WAN optimization services as software on standard servers.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. VLANs logically segment Layer 2 networks into separate broadcast domains. VLANs can improve security and traffic organization, but they do not virtualize network appliances or deliver branch services like virtual firewalls and WAN optimization.