VMworld 2010 Reporting: Cisco Nexus 1000V

Cisco has shipped over 1 million virtual Ethernet ports to date. The switch is built on the Cisco NX-OS and is compatible with all switching platforms. The infrastructure is made up of a virtual supervisor module and virtual Ethernet module. Based on the Nexus 7000 framework. Cisco is looking to extend it's framework using a Virtual Service Node. The VSM has a virtual appliance form factor.

Customers have been asking for networking services at the kernel level vs. the guest OS level to improve performance. Cisco has started down this path by introducing virtual service domains. Virtual service domains define a logical group of vms protected by a virtual appliance.

This year Cisco is introducing a new architecture: vPath. Network packets are redirected to virtual service nodes to enforce policies to say push communications through firewall. Virtual service nodes can support multiple ESX hosts to eliminate the appliance per host framework. These redirect policies are cached on the Nexus 1000 to reduce the network overhead. Cisco's first implementation of this architecture is the virtual security gateway which is a firewall architecture. The virtual security gateway can be deployed in an active standby configuration. To manage a combined virtual security gateway and Nexus 1000V architecture an administration point is now available; the virtual network management center. You can now manage multiple zones; network and security, so that policy can be enforced across both. This environment allows you to setup different SLA's for network bandwidth consumption on a group of VMs. In addition Port Mirroring is supported to enable traffic analyzers. This enables troubleshooting on a multi-tenant environment without exposing everyones traffic. This allows you to get very granular when you pipe out network traffic in a cloud environment.

Cisco has been working with several partners to extend vMotion across long distances. Cisco refers to this development as Over the Top Virtualization (OTV).

Nexus 1000V Myths

- Nexus switching is based on proprietary Cisco standards. No it is based on open standards

- Only works with Nexus switching. No it works with any Ethernet switch






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