VMware and Cisco
Cisco is a VMware Global Alliance Partner, Community Source Partner, and investment/collaboration partner. Cisco is also a vCloud technology partner. Cisco’s key messages are Increase Business Agility by implementing a flexible data center, Enhance Efficiency by virtualizing network and IT resources, and Improve Resilience by ensuring data availability.
With VMware infrastructure, customers can quickly scale the number of virtual machines in the data center and the remote office/branch office to meet growing and changing business demands. The rapid adoption of virtual machines places new demands on the networking infrastructure where the underlying LAN, WAN, and storage area network (SAN) architecture must be capable of handling a dense virtual machine environment, providing logical port scalability and maintaining deterministic performance, security, availability, and manageability. Similarly, the data center must be capable of supporting high virtual machine density and virtual machine mobility without compromising segmentation to support business requirements such as information security and regulatory compliance. The VMware and Cisco alliance delivers solutions that allow organizations to implement their server virtualization strategies supported by high availability and stability, enhanced security, better manageability, and compliance to policies.
Cisco Catalyst switches and Cisco MDS 9000 family storage area network (SAN) switches address these new design requirements and support functions that deliver predictable application performance, security, segmentation, and availability for dense virtual machine environments. The Cisco Data Center Network Architecture (DCNA) delivers virtualization of network services, storage, security, and Layer 4 to 7 processing of application traffic.
Key solution areas from Cisco:
- Virtual Machine Portability – to maximize the value of server virtualization with live migration of virtual machines delivering high availability and energy efficiency, a data center needs to still be able to apply security and corporate policies at the machine level and have that migrate as well. Accounting and IT still need to be able to ‘view’ the machines on the network. Cisco’s VN-Link technology connects the server, storage and network management arenas allowing full communication between all the systems. VN-Link allows for:
- Policy-based configurations – putting the IT back in control of configuring assets and balancing business needs with efficiency and flexibility.
- Mobile security and network policy – smooths the transitions between networks and ensures security policies move with the virtual machines.
- Non-Disruptive Management – streamlines visibility and consistency across both physical and virtual machines.
- Comprehensive Blade Server I/O Solutions – Cisco provides blade-specific switches that help drive the cost of virtualizing the data center down, while still promoting end-user satisfaction and IT efficiency. The family of Cisco Blade Switches includes Cisco Catalyst Ethernet blade switches and Cisco MDS Fibre Channel blade switches for blade servers. All Cisco Blade Switches are:
- Easy to implement and maintain – fewer virtual blade switches are needed than standard switches; familiar Cisco management technology and tools; simple SAN switch management; expand a Fibre Channel implementation with N port virtualization (NPV)
- “Server-Smart” – resiliency leads to high availability in both the blade server and virtual machine; live migrations and portability maintaining, not breaking, security policies; optimized network bandwidth with smart server traffic management capabilities
- Flexible – virtual switches can ensure an “optimal” network is defined based on application need; Cisco FlexAttach maintains virtual machine/storage resource connections during migrations; scalable LAN and SAN solutions and choice in configuration and management tools (e.g. GUI and command-line interface)
VMware on cisco.com
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