Cisco and VMware Expand Their Strategic Partnership to Deliver Next Generation Cloud Infrastructures

Last week Cisco and VMware announced their intention to consolidate their partnership with the common objective of developing integrated products and solutions designed for software-defined datacenters. This collaborative effort will include integrating Cisco’s flagship line of Nexus 1000V switches into VMware’s vSphere 5.1 suite. The two will also co-develop Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)-based cloud systems that bundle vSphere 5.1 and vCloud 5.1 with Cisco-made switch, firewall and router products.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V is a pure software implementation of a Cisco Nexus switch that is embedded in the software kernel of VMware vSphere ESX to deliver VN-Link, virtual machine-aware network services. Its key features are:

• Policy-based virtual machine connectivity: Provides real-time coordinated configuration of network and security services and maintains a virtual machine-centric management model, enabling the server administrator to increase both efficiency and flexibility.
  
  
• Mobile virtual machine security and network policy: Allows policy to move with a virtual machine during live migration ensuring persistent network, security, and storage compliance resulting in improved business continuance, performance management, and security compliance.
  
  
• Non-disruptive operational model: The Cisco Nexus 1000V aligns management of the operational environment for virtual machines and physical server connectivity in the datacenter, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) by providing operational consistency and visibility throughout the network. It offers flexible collaboration between the server, network, security, and storage teams, while supporting various organizational boundaries and individual team autonomy.

The strategic alliance between Cisco and VMware has been in place for some time, but the recent announcement deepened the connection between the two firms. The primary purpose of the partnership is to allow each member to commit investment dollars to the creation of an integrated division. The division will hire a completely new and independent engineering team that will focus on enablement of the software-defined datacenter through a deeper collaboration and integration across the VMware cloud infrastructure and management stacks and Cisco's Datacenter Networking and Fabric Computing platforms.

In praising the importance of the collaboration, Pat Gelsinger, incoming VMware CEO said, “The software-defined datacenter will deliver the next leap in software-based datacenter automation across server, storage and networking, but it requires equal hardware and systems-based innovation. We are very excited to further our partnership with Cisco, the industry-leading innovator in networking, as we believe it will bring significant value to our joint customers through the integration of the VMware cloud infrastructure platform with Cisco's intelligent network fabric.”

What This Means to You

To Customers: Cisco is noted for offering significant portions of its software on VMware, which can now operate under the Cisco UCS servers and other qualified servers. In addition, they are arguably first in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner’s UC Magic Quadrant (August 27, 2012). Going forward, Cisco and VMware will make significant joint engineering investments to develop technology integration initiatives, which will launch a new set of solutions designed to provide customers significantly increased levels of agile compute and network services, workload and workspace mobility, end-to-end visibility, and ease of troubleshooting across their physical and virtual infrastructures. Cisco and VMware will also provide Cisco Validated Designs and reference architectures to simplify and accelerate customer implementation of these joint solutions.

Customers should be aware that these solutions are targeted at large virtualizations and deployments. The Cisco Nexus 1000V can only be used with the VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus edition or acceleration kit. U.S. suggested list price per processor for a VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and Cisco Nexus 1000V Bundle is $3,895.

To Partners: Cisco and VMware joint solutions will be made available for VCE (Virtual Computing Environment Company), as well as ecosystem partners, to help drive customer adoption of its converged infrastructure platforms. Cisco and VMware remain strongly committed, along with EMC, to the VCE partnership.