Business and IT leaders require a more responsive IT infrastructure that can help accelerate business initiatives and remove inefficiencies. To meet this challenge, the IT infrastructure needs to be based on an IT model with a new services delivery architecture that enables services as needed. It needs to evolve from a traditional campus architecture that delivers basic connectivity to separate, siloed departments into an agile, resilient, and adaptive architecture that delivers service orchestration. With these changes, the IT department becomes a business unit that delivers services to improve the enterprise rather than simply a cost center. The technology that helps deliver this new dynamic IT infrastructure is called Network Virtualization.
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This is a very useful overview paper, combining both conceptual perspectives and concrete advice. I particularly like the structure of first defining the challenges and then proposing a virtualization architecture. There's also a great section on firewalls in a virtualized environment.
The paper is somewhat specific to Cisco's solutions, but it's great reading regardless of your exact choice of supplier.