Cisco Makes Virtual Switches Very Real
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Enterprise Networking Planet reports early adopters find Cisco's Nexus 1000V Series switches are helping them break down silos in IT, making it easier to deploy virtualized systems to customers more quickly.
Cisco's virtual switches were designed for converged environments. For many early adopters, this means a smooth path to the cloud.
Cisco Nexus 1000V Series switches were designed to facilitate networking in a converged environment. These virtual machine (VM) access switches integrate well with VMware vSphere while running the Cisco NX-OS operating system. This virtual switch actually operates inside the VMware ESX hypervisor to provide policy-based VM connectivity, mobile VM security and network policy.
So how do users like them? Kevin Carr, director of IT for the County of Denton, was quickly running out of network capacity as he moved 150 physical servers to VMware on a Cisco-based network. He added in the Cisco Nexus 1000v to ease the pain.
"We have a lot more capacity than we need so we can say yes to every server request and deliver VMs super fast over the network," said Carr.
The City and County of San Francisco also added Cisco Nexus 1000V switches along with Cisco Unified Compute System (UCS) blades to create its converged network. This platform is being used to move from a distributed infrastructure consisting of 40 data centers and server rooms spread all around the city.
The strategy is to virtualize 335 Windows servers onto 25 UCS blades and Nexus 1000v switches on a VMware with EMC Storage. He has set a two-year horizon to arrive at a fully virtual data center.
