NetworkWorld has an interview with Nicira’s CTO where he outlines Nicira’s plans for a network based hypervisor to help further the their vision of SDN. The hypervisor would be independent of VMware’s platform. It would be to networking what vSphere is to server virtualization. The idea is to be able to run network control appliances at a hypervisor level. I’m interested to see what type of hardware this would run on and how performance will be optimized for enterprise class performance and reliability. These are pretty exciting times in network based virtualization.