Abstract: Systems and methods for assigning virtualized network elements to physical resources in a cloud computing environment are provided. A resource request is received as input indicating a required number of virtual machines and a set of virtual flows, each of the virtual flows indicating a connection between two virtual machines which need to communicate with one another. Each of the requested virtual machines is assigned to a physical server. The set of virtual flows can be modified to remove any virtual flow connecting virtual machines which have been assigned to the same physical server. Each of the virtual flows in the modified set is assigned to a physical link. If a bandwidth capacity of a requested virtual flow is greater than the available bandwidth of a single physical link between servers, multiple links can be allocated to the virtual flow.