Fascinating. The top geeks at Cisco have actually found a way to produce a switch without bothering with any metal or plastic associated with networking gear.
Together with its close partner, VMware, Cisco has come up with the Cisco Nexus 1000V. The official press release calls it "a distributed virtual software switch will simplify the operations of both physical and virtual networking infrastructures to help server, virtualization and networking administration managers accelerate data center virtualization."
In essence, what this means – in non-marketing-speak - is that guys like me get to create a virtual network within servers to connect all of the VMware environments that are running in my data centre! Not to mention the fact that I also get to extend the same level of security, policy enforcement, automated provisioning and diagnostics features into all of my VMs as well! We’re talking about the ability to scale to thousands of live VMs – without the need for additional physical networking equipment! Am I using too many exclamation marks! If I am, it’s because this is precisely the type of cutting-edge stuff that I need!
Why does the Cisco Nexus 1000V matter to me? We tend to get carried away with how easy it is to create new VMs – a click of a mouse, and presto! here’s yet another virtual server that we’ve now got to provision, secure, enforce and etc. The apps guys forget that just like physical servers, virtual servers need to socialize and talk to one another too. And who gets to worry about that? Yours truly. On top of that, I get the “pleasure” of identifying, monitoring, moving, and updating them. Whoop-de-doo.
So you can see why, with all the stuff I have to handle, I’m almost wetting my pants at the idea of Nexus 1000V – which, by the way, won “Best New Technology” at the recent VMWorld 2008 event. Wow.
Only downside is that the Nexus 1000V will come only in early 2009, so in the meantime, I will just have to keep on, keeping on.
Here's what I was talking about:
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