One of the many challenges in the Data Centre is the “Network beyond the Network” by this we mean the boundary between the Cisco Nexus 5000 and 7000 switches and the virtual machines running on the UCS compute platforms.

In order for the physical interfaces of the servers to connect to the virtual interfaces of the virtual machines you need a software switch. However this switch, which is logically a part of the network infrastructure is actually running with in the VMware VSphere environment. This results in the network infrastructure being one step removed from the virtual machine, this gives us a number of challenges maintaining QOS and other network polices as virtual machines move physical chassis.

The solution to this is the Cisco 1000v virtual switch that replaces the VSwitch within the ESXi hypervisor, so resulting in one contiguous switched infrastructure all running the same NX-OS operating system.

However this is all well an good in the VMware world, what about if your virtualisation partner is Microsoft. Well this is about to change next year, Cisco are now updating the Nexus 1000v and Virtual machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) to run in a Hyper-V 3.0 on the Windows server 8 Platform.

So with the advent of the Hyper-V 3.0 virtualisation platform and the power of the Windows Server 8 operation system operators will have the opportunity to swap the virtual switch used within the Hyper-V for the Nexus 1000v in the same way that the VMware guys can today.

The product is in beta testing with Microsoft and is expected to ship at the same time as Hyper-V 3.0 does, however because this is built on the increased functionality of the new platform don’t expect that this will be available for the current Hyper-V and 2008 server platforms. I think it is also reasonable to expect that Cisco will increase its presence in this area and don’t think we will have to wait too long for news of 1000v support for the Red Hat KVM Hypervisor as well

John Berry — Global Knowledge Cisco Trainer