This past week was National Simplify Your Life Week. It was a time of year to organize your garage — or your sock drawer. It’s the week for eliminating all those unnecessary items in your life. In other words: it’s time to de-clutter so you can de-stress!

Perhaps nowhere is the need for simplicity more important than in the life of today’s IT professionals. From managing networks to building and deploying applications, the day-to-day rigor of IT is anything but simple. Add to that the emergency calls and fires you have to put out, and you’ve got one full plate. The good news is that when you begin to use network virtualization, you can make that plate seem a bit less full — and your life a little less overwhelming.

So with that in mind, we’re bringing you seven ways network virtualization eliminates complexity and helps simplify your life.

1. Virtual networks let every lab use the same set of IP addresses. No more hunting down an unused set of addresses for next week’s training lab.

2. Want a network for your virtual workload? Get it in seconds. No racking and stacking required.

3. Simplify your choices in underlying network infrastructure. Network virtualization runs on top of any network gear.

4. Need new services? No problem. Services such as logical routers, firewalls, load balancers, etc. all can be spun up on demand and as needed in just a few minutes.

5. Rogue networks become a thing of the past. There’s only one place to provision, configure, manage, audit virtual networks. No one can just ‘plug in’ a switch or add a network without the administrator knowing about it.

6. Threat isolation gets a whole lot easier with Layer 2 virtual networks. Compromised virtual workloads can be programmatically removed from production virtual networks to quarantined virtual networks, which are not routable.

7. No need to configure and plumb VLANs to accommodate VM placement and mobility. Place VMs wherever you like – in your data center, in different PODs, out in the Cloud.

Simplify Your Life Week is a great time to take inventory of your tech life. And hopefully you’ve found this list helpful — a way to kick-start your search for simplicity. After all, the more you streamline, the more efficient you can be. And that’s good news for your clients — and your stress level! So now that you’ve simplified your life with network virtualization, you can get to work on that sock drawer.

The VMware Networking Team