Cisco accelerates innovation in data center virtualization with Microsoft

Today Cisco announced it is collaborating with Microsoft to deliver data center virtualization solutions designed to provide improved scalability and operational control of Microsoft Windows Server “8” virtual environments. The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch and the Cisco Unified Computing System with Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) capabilities will work with the Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisor to provide customers with advanced Cisco networking features that are constant across both virtual and physical networks while supporting customers’ existing IT management processes.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch adds the dynamic provisioning and management capabilities of Cisco NX-OS Software to Windows Server Hyper-V to simplify the operations of virtual networking infrastructures as extensions of physical networks. It also provides full VM-level visibility, security controls in a virtualized environment that are consistent with their Cisco physical network.

Cisco’s policy enforcement, automated provisioning and diagnostics features are available through Cisco Nexus 1000V, and will help IT administrators to rapidly deploy virtual workloads in Windows Server Hyper-V environments and scale to very large data centers.

By working with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) management tools, the Cisco Nexus 1000V will help network, virtualization and server administrators gain efficiency in collaboratively managing multi-tenant and mobile virtual environments.  It also helps them to obtain accurate, real-time data for troubleshooting of virtual environments.

Through integration with Cisco’s security software (Virtual Security Gateway and Virtual ASA), application optimization software (Virtual Wide Area Application Services) and network monitoring software (Network Analysis Module), the Nexus 1000V provides granular virtual-machine-level security and application acceleration for multi-tenant environments, as well as actionable VM-to-VM activity monitoring and reporting.

The Cisco UCS with VM-FEX capabilities, helps IT administrators to provision, configure, manage, monitor, and diagnose virtual machine network traffic from within one unified infrastructure that manages compute, network and virtualization resources.

Application deployments will be faster with the automation of virtual machine creation through policy-based network configurations that are supported by both companies' virtualization management tools.