VMware and Cisco Collaborate on Cloud Innovation

  • Aug 31, 2011

At VMworld 2011, VMware and Cisco announced new technology innovation and enhancements to their combined virtualization solutions that help customers accelerate their journey to the cloud. Expanding on a strategic relationship and engineering collaboration that spans more than four years, the companies, in conjunction with industry partners, unveiled a breakthrough in network virtualization that will broaden the mobility range of virtual machines across multiple datacenters and cloud environments. The companies also announced enhancements to several desktop virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions designed to boost scalability, security and performance.

Virtual Extensible Local Area Network, or VXLAN, is a step in the path toward logical, virtual networks that can be created on-demand, enabling enterprises to utilize computing and storage capacity for mission critical applications -- wherever it's available. For applications running in the cloud, IT managers need to control every user's access to data and applications with logical networks for each instance of the application. VXLAN will scale to meet the millions of logical networks required to run applications in the cloud with efficient utilization of network resources.

VXLAN will also support applications running in hybrid clouds where compute capacity is delivered from pools of resources that may span across private and public clouds, VXLAN will offer a network encapsulation technique with segment identifiers for creating millions of logical networks and for enabling workloads to seamlessly move across datacenters and cloud infrastructures. These networking segments will support cloud infrastructures that support multi-tenants that require segmentation for added security and compliance.

VXLAN, which has the support of multiple industry leading vendors, has been submitted for standardization at Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and a draft of the VXLAN specification is available on the IETF website. VMware demonstrated the VXLAN technology during today's VMworld general session keynote delivered by Steve Herrod, VMware CTO and senior vice president of R&D. Additionally, during today's Cisco Super Session, Soni Jiandani, senior vice president Server, Access and Virtualization Technology, will highlight benefits from this cloud innovation.

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) has set a new world record for the VMware VMmark 2.1 benchmark, the industry standard cloud benchmark for performance. Cisco UCS achieved the highest score ever recorded for the VMware VMmark 2.1 benchmark with a 21% performance advantage over other identical server core count. The VMware VMmark 2.1 benchmark models a typical cloud environment, using key VMware vSphere features such as VMware vMotion, VMware Storage vMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler to balance the workload across the available resources in the cloud.

"Together with VMware, Cisco has unlocked the power of the network to extend virtual machines beyond the confines of a single stack to the entire data center and cloud infrastructure from different locations. VXLAN will provide the ability to scale networking segments to millions of VMs to ease the deployment of applications in the cloud. Also, by segmenting these VMs and applications via highly secure virtual networks, customers will be able to achieve the security required for multi-tenant cloud environments," said Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Server, Access, Virtualization Technology Group for Cisco.

Last November, Cisco and VMware announced a desktop virtualization solution based on Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) system and VMware View 4.5. Cisco and VMware are expanding VXI solution to support VMware View 5 as well as integrations with Cisco suite of collaboration solutions. VMware View with Cisco Unified Communications provide a collaborative workspace that will include call control and increased scalability with VMware vSphere 5, VMware View 5, Cisco Unified Communications (UC) and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). VMware View 5 will be available on Cisco Cius and Cisco Virtualization Experience Clients (VXC) 2100 and 2200 endpoints to provide workers with highly secure, real-time access to business applications and content, anytime and anywhere, without compromise of the rich collaborative user experience. VMware View with WebEx Connect 7 enables Click-To-Call communication between users running WebEx Connect inside VMware View virtual desktops, enabling users to communicate more effectively.

"Our partnership with Cisco has resulted in numerous technology innovations that are delivering strategic value across customer environments," said Raghu Raghuram, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Infrastructure and Management, VMware. "With the new and enhanced technology integrations announced today, we're continuing to help customers transform their datacenters for enterprise hybrid cloud computing and their desktops for the post-PC era."

Cisco and VMware combined solutions have been enhanced with the latest VMware vSphere 5 and Cisco UCS 2.0 solutions to deliver a strong foundation for cloud computing. The enhanced solutions offer better cloud management capabilities to virtualize the most demanding business-critical applications and workloads. The VXLAN technology will be supported in VMware vSphere 5, VMware vCloud Director 1.5 and Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch to deliver an on-demand cloud infrastructure to enhance the end-user experience. Beyond the VXLAN technology, Cisco Nexus 1000V and VMware vCloud Director 1.5 will offer auto-deploy capabilities to simplify installation and deliver VXLAN-based network isolation that simplifies troubleshooting and management of applications running in the cloud. To further address security in multi-tenant cloud infrastructures, Cisco is demonstrating Virtual ASA firewall for Nexus 1000V and plans to integrate Cisco's Virtual ASA firewall with VMware vCloud Director. Simplified management: Cisco UCS 2.0 automates hypervisor provisioning by integrating VMware vSphere 5 Auto Deploy with UCS Manager. Administrators may now deploy many VMware vSphere nodes linked to a single Auto Deploy boot image in a single operation as compared to many manual steps with traditional systems. This integration speeds IT service delivery and reduces opportunities for errors by enforcing server and network configuration policies with VMware vSphere images.

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