Overview; Audience; Introduction; Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Components - Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Deployment Manual

Overview

This document provides design and configuration guidance for deploying the Cisco Nexus
with VMware vSphere 4.0. For detailed configuration documentation, please refer to the respective Cisco
VMware product configuration guides. Links to the product configuration guides can be found in the "For More
Information" section of this document.

Audience

This document is intended for network architects, network engineers, virtualization administrators, and server
administrators interested in understanding and deploying VMware vSphere 4.0 hosts in a Cisco data center
environment.

Introduction

Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switches are virtual machine access switches that are an intelligent software switch
implementation for VMware vSphere environments running the Cisco NX-OS Software operating system. Operating
inside the VMware ESX hypervisor, the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series supports Cisco VN-Link server virtualization
technology to provide:
Policy-based virtual machine connectivity
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Mobile virtual machine security and network policy
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Nondisruptive operational model for your server virtualization, and networking teams
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When server virtualization is deployed in the data center, virtual servers typically are not managed the same way as
physical servers. Server virtualization is treated as a special deployment, leading to longer deployment time, with a
greater degree of coordination among server, network, storage, and security administrators. With the Cisco Nexus
1000V Series, you can have 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 now use the same
network configuration, security policy, diagnostic tools, and operational models as their physical server counterparts
attached to dedicated physical network ports. Virtualization administrators can access predefined network policy that
follows mobile virtual machines to help ensure proper connectivity, saving valuable time to focus on virtual machine
administration. This comprehensive set of capabilities helps you deploy server virtualization faster and gain its
benefits sooner.
Developed in close collaboration with VMware, the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series is certified by VMware to be
compatible with VMware vSphere, vCenter, ESX, and ESXi, and with many other VMware vSphere features. You can
use the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series to manage your virtual machine connectivity with confidence in the integrity of the
server virtualization infrastructure.

Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Components

The Cisco Nexus 1000V Series provides Layer 2 switching advanced networking functions and a common network
management model in a virtualized server environment by replacing the virtual switch within VMware vSphere. The
Cisco Nexus 1000V Series manages a data center as defined in VMware vCenter Server. Each server in the data
center is represented as a line card in the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series and can be managed as if it were a line card in
a physical Cisco switch.
The Cisco Nexus 1000V Series implementation has two main components:
Virtual supervisor module (VSM)
●
Virtual Ethernet module (VEM)
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© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Deployment Guide
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1000V Series Switches
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