You are currently browsing the Should Have Gone With Cisco weblog archives for the day August 4, 2009.
August 4, 2009 by ted.
I noticed that Cisco has been advertising free evaluations of the Nexus 1000v on their website.
I decided I would give it a go and share my experiences and thoughts. Now I’m by no means an ESX expert, but I have recently started playing more and more with it. I have always been partial to regular VMware Workstation myself.
Background
I’m not going to go into too much detail here, but I wanted to give some background to add some context to the Nexus 1000v.
VMware has come out with this new Distributed Virtual Switching (DVS) term and Cisco has basically latched on with the introduction of the 1000v (as can other 3rd parties). Historically, we are used to using the integrated VMware virtual switch (vswitch) within the hypervisor in our ESX servers. You can basically think of the Nexus 1000v as a way of doing-away with the VMware vswitch and putting a Cisco virtual switch in its place.
So why replace a VMware switch with a Cisco switch? Let’s think about where we typically draw the imaginary line in ownership between our Server and Network teams. If I have an ESX hypervisor hosting 5 different virtual machines, they get connected internally with the vmware soft switch (vswitch). As a server admin, I have to create my port groups (or profiles) and assign them manually to each VM. I could use this to put each VM in its own VLAN for example. So the server guy is definitely forced to know a little bit about networking because he now has to manage the vswitch. As a network guy, I handle the port connecting to the physical ESX host. That’s going to be the “demarc” for me, as that’s pretty standard for how far my responsibility traditionally goes. If the server guy thinks there’s a problem with connectivity, I’ll verify all the way up to the port that connects to the server. At that point, I’ve verified everything on my end. Things are starting to change with virtualization…
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