Cisco Nexus 7000 Design Manual page 19

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Cisco VM-FEX
Cisco VM-FEX technology collapses virtual switching infrastructure and physical switching
infrastructure into a single, easy-to-manage environment. Benefits include:
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Cisco VM-FEX is supported on VMware ESX hypervisors and fully supports workload mobility through
VMware vMotion.
The Cisco VM-FEX eliminates the virtual switch within the hypervisor by providing individual Virtual
Machines (VMs) virtual ports on the physical network switch. VM I/O is directly sent to the upstream
physical network switch that takes full responsibility for VM switching and policy enforcement. This
leads to consistent treatment for all network traffic, virtual or physical. The Cisco VM-FEX reduces the
number of network management points by an order of magnitude as the physical and the virtual
switching layers are consolidated into a single switching infrastructure.
The UCS VIC leverages VMware's Direct Path I/O technology to significantly improve throughput and
latency of VM I/O. Direct Path allows direct assignment of Personal Computer interconnect express
(PCIe) devices to VMs. VM I/O bypasses the hypervisor layer and is placed directly on the PCIe device
associated with the VM. The Cisco VM-FEX unifies the virtual and physical networking infrastructure
by allowing a switch ASIC to perform switching in hardware, not on a software based virtual switch.
The Cisco VM-FEX is off loads the ESXi hypervisor, which may improve the performance of any hosted
VM applications.
NetApp FAS and Data ONTAP
NetApp solutions are user friendly, easy to manage, and quick to deploy and offer increased availability
while consuming fewer IT resources. This means that they dramatically lower the lifetime total cost of
ownership. Whereas others manage complexity, NetApp eliminates it. A NetApp solution includes
hardware in the form of controllers and disk storage and the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system.
NetApp offers the NetApp Unified Storage Architecture. The term "unified" refers to a family of storage
systems that simultaneously support Storage Area Network (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS),
and iSCSI across many operating environments such as VMware, Windows®, and UNIX®. This single
architecture provides access to data by using industry-standard protocols, including NFS, CIFS, iSCSI,
FCP, SCSI, FTP, and HTTP. Connectivity options include standard Ethernet (10/100/1000, or 10GbE)
and Fibre Channel (1, 2, 4, or 8Gb/sec). In addition, all systems can be configured with
high-performance Solid State Drives (SSDs) or Serial ATA (SAS) disks for primary storage applications,
low-cost SATA disks for secondary applications (backup, archive, and so on), or a mix of the different
disk types.
A storage system running Data ONTAP has a main unit, also known as the controller or storage engine,
which is the hardware device that receives and sends data. This unit detects and gathers information
about the hardware configuration, the storage system components, the operational status, hardware
failures, and other error conditions.
A storage system uses storage on disk shelves. The disk shelves are the containers or device carriers that
hold disks and associated hardware such as power supplies, connectivity interfaces, and cabling.
Simplified operations—Eliminates the need for a separate, virtual networking infrastructure
Improved network security—Contains VLAN proliferation
Optimized network utilization—Reduces broadcast domains
Enhanced application performance—Off loads virtual machine switching from host CPU to parent
switch Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs)
VMware vSphere 5.1 on FlexPod with Nexus 7000 Using FCoE
FlexPod Design Details
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