The Cisco Nexus® 1100 Series Cloud Services Platforms (CSPs) offer dedicated hardware appliances for the deployment of network services critical to virtualized data center infrastructure (Figure 1). The appliances host a number of virtual service blades (VSBs), including the following: - Cisco Nexus 1000V Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM), which acts as the control plane (VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V deployments)
- Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG), which provides a firewall for east-west traffic (VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V deployments)
- Cisco Prime™ Network Analysis Module (NAM), which provides in-depth analytics
- Citrix NetScaler 1000V Application Delivery Controller (ADC)
These VSBs provide a comprehensive solution for virtual networking services in the data center. Dedicated hardware for the Cisco Nexus 1000V VSM eases virtual access switch deployment for the network administrator, and with its support for additional VSBs, the Cisco Nexus 1100 Series CSPs are crucial components of a virtualized data center. Cisco Nexus 1000V Switches Cisco Nexus 1000V Switches are intelligent virtual machine access switches designed for hypervisor environments. Operating inside a hypervisor, the Cisco Nexus 1000V supports server virtualization technology to provide: - Policy-based virtual machine connectivity
- Mobile virtual machine security and network policy
- Nondisruptive operation model for your server virtualization and networking teams
Server virtualization usually changes the deployment and management of server operating systems, leading to longer deployment times, with a greater amount of coordination among server, network, storage, and security administrators. The Cisco Nexus 1000V offers a consistent networking feature set and provisioning process all the way from the virtual machine access layer to the core of the data center network infrastructure. Virtual servers can use the same network configuration, security policy, diagnostic tools, and operation models as their physical server counterparts attached to dedicated physical network ports. Virtualization administrators can access predefined network policies that follow mobile virtual machines to help ensure proper connectivity, saving valuable time that administrators can use to focus on virtual machine administration. This comprehensive set of capabilities helps you deploy server virtualization faster and achieve its benefits sooner. Figure 2 shows VMware vSphere; however, Microsoft Hyper-V is also supported. |