Understanding physical and virtual networking

Let's think about networking for a second. This is a subject that most system administrators nowadays understand pretty well. This might not up to the level many of us think we do, but still – if we were to try to find an area of system administration where we'd find the biggest common level of knowledge, it would be networking.

So, what's the problem with that?

Actually, nothing much. If we really understand physical networking, virtual networking is going to be a piece of cake for us. Spoiler alert: it's the same thing. If we don't, it's going to be exposed rather quickly, because there's no way around it. And the problems are going to get bigger and bigger as time goes by because environments evolve and – usually – grow. The bigger they are, the more problems they're going to create, and the more time you're going to spend in debugging mode.

That being said, if...