Here's our wrapup of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) news from the past week -- and a little bit about the coming week, too, because it's VMworld time.

1. SDN Market Projection: $3.5B

The latest market-size prediction for SDN is $3.52 billion by 2018, as calculated by Transparency Market Research and reported by eWeek.

That's in contrast to IDC's forecast of a $3.7 billion SDN market by 2016 and SDxCentral's market-impact figure of $35 billion by 2018. The disparity isn't because we're screaming optimists. The $35 billion -- derived in collaboration with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Plexxi -- is more about the effect of SDN. That is, it's counting equipment sales that will depend on (or will be driven by) SDN, even if the ports themselves don't get SDN'ified immediately.

2. CloudNFV Beknights Metaswitch

We keep mentioning that the CloudNFV organization consists the original Gang of Six vendors, Tom Nolle of CIMI Corp., and ... Metaswitch, which is an important contributor and probably loads of fun to have around, but is still this separate, non-founding entity.

Now Metaswitch has a better sounding designation: CloudNFV's first integration partner. It makes sense, considering Project Clearwater -- an open-source Internet multimedia subsystem (IMS) effort started by Metaswitch -- matches CloudNFV's goals and will probably be the source of the group's first NFV prototype.

3. Arista Adds More Friends

Opscode Chef can now be used to configure Arista Networks' gear, the companies announced Monday. They've come up with a Chef Cookbook (preconfigured recipes) for functions such as VLAN creation or link aggregation.

Opscode is working on similar collaborations with Cisco, Cumulus, Juniper, and Plexxi. But Arista officials claim theirs was the easiest integration due to the open nature of Arista's Extensible Operating System (EOS). "It took two hours, and that's because we were eating pizza," says Mark Berly, EOS product manager.

Separately, ExtraHop announced Thursday that its analytics platform now works with Arista's Data ANalyZer (DANZ) software to create the Persistent Monitoring Architecture -- network visibility at a dymanic level. It could provide the kind of forensic capability Insieme's CTO, Tom Edsall, was talking about at Hot Interconnects earlier this week.

His point was that network management has to step up its game as network virtualization arrives. Analyst Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research made the same point in writing about the Extrahop announcement, and it's likely to be a major theme at VMworld next week.

4. A Head Start on VMworld

Speaking of VMworld -- we've already mentioned that NSX, VMware's network-virtualization platform, will get the spotlight. The agenda also includes a networking version of the Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware's load-balancing technology, as SearchServerVirtualization pointed out.

From the Yellow Bricks blog comes this list of lesser-known vendors to check out at VMworld. (Relatively. Cumulus and Plexxi are on the list.) If that's not specific enough for you, Cormac Hogan limited his list to storage vendors.

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