Resource allocation is a crucial challenge for network virtualization (NV) in a cloud environment. Virtual network embedding (VNE) approaches exemplify NV technologies’ critical utility, which must efficiently deal with potential network issues. To promote cloud infrastructure flexibility, software-defined networking (SDN) has been adopted as a network practice to centralize the manageability of the data centre network (DCN) resources. This paper introduces a classification approach that ensures an accurate starting point for solving the VNE problem in a distributed system. The solution implementation is based on measuring the importance of each DCN using the spearman rank correlation coefficient. Afterward, we devise a constructive algorithm that classifies DCNs in clusters from unsupervised data learning. This DCN management allows us to direct the VNE process to a small number of DCNs, which will reduce the dimensionality of the search operation in a distributed environment. Ultimately, we adopt various metaheuristics as a VNE optimizer for the selected DCN. Numerical results verify that the Jenks natural breaks classification outperforms similar methods in terms of resource utilization and acceptance ratio.