Cisco Nexus 7000 Design Manual page 8

FlexPod Solution Overview
FlexPod Solution Overview
Industry trends indicate a vast data center transformation toward shared infrastructure and cloud
computing. Enterprise customers are moving away from isolated centers of IT operation toward more
cost-effective virtualized environments.
The objective of the move toward virtualization, and eventually to cloud computing, is to increase agility
and reduce costs.
Especially because companies must address resistance to change in both their organizational and
technical IT models, achieving this transformation can seem daunting and complex. To accelerate the
process and simplify the evolution to a shared cloud infrastructure, Cisco and NetApp have developed a
solution called VMware vSphere® on FlexPod.
FlexPod® is a predesigned, best practice data center architecture that is built on the Cisco UCS, the
Cisco Nexus® family of switches, and NetApp Fabric Attached storage (FAS) or V-Series systems.
FlexPod is a suitable platform for running a variety of virtualization hypervisors as well as bare metal
operating systems and enterprise workloads. FlexPod delivers a baseline configuration and also has the
flexibility to be sized and optimized to accommodate many different use cases and requirements.
Figure 1 shows the components used in this solution, while also highlighting the inherent flexibility of
FlexPod.
Figure 1 FlexPod Component Families
This document describes VMware vSphere 5.1 built on the FlexPod model from Cisco and NetApp and
discusses design choices and deployment of best practices using this shared infrastructure platform.
VMware vSphere 5.1 on FlexPod with Nexus 7000 Using FCoE
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