Pluribus Networks announced on Tuesday that it has added a new software-defined networking (SDN) element to its Netvisor platform.

Pluribus’s Virtualization-Centric Fabric (VCF) taps into networking, clustering, management, and resilience features to create a virtualized networking fabric for data centers and large enterprises. VCF provides flow-level visibility into the virtual machines and containers in a virtualized network while also automating connectivity across the entire fabric.

Pluribus CTO and co-founder Sunay Tripathi says that with increasing use of virtual machines and containers there needs to be a way to manage the physical and virtual networks as one entity. With VCF, physical switch ports become virtual ports. Along with Pluribus’s Netvisor operating systems for open switches, the virtual ports can be tracked across the fabric.

“As virtual machines and containers come and go, or move around, the fabric knows where they are,” he explains. “Using these virtual ports, we can build virtual networks that can figure out the policies and automation in terms of creating VXLAN tunnels and rules with full insight.”

VCF includes an API that enables applications to take advantage of the fabric as a single entity — instead of an individual switch at the port level — using common programming interfaces including REST, Java, JSON, and C++.

Elements of the VCF architecture were in play when Pluribus announced a business partnership with Ericsson earlier this year to support Ericsson’s Hyper Scale Data Systems for the Cloud. Dell, which is also a partner of Pluribus, is also using some of the VCF components.

Pluribus updated Netvisor to version 2.3 in August, which at the time included some of the components that are now under the VCF moniker.

“This is something that we’ve been working on for several years,” Tripathi says. “We’ve added some things over the past few months, and now we’re giving it (VCF) a name to extend the concept of what a virtualization fabric is.”

On the competitive front, Tripathi says, Pluribus is picking up former Cisco ACI customers.

“A lot of people aren’t happy with Cisco ACI because it lacks capabilities and it’s not open. The Cisco ACI is kind of the prime thing that we’re replacing with Netvisor.”

Pluribus’s VCF is available now, and it’s compatible with Netvisor 2.2 or later.