VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

Last night I received an e-mail from Cisco thanking me for my work in the Nexus 1000V beta program and announcing the availability of the final product.

For those of you that don’t know the Cisco Nexus 1000V, it is a pure software implementation of a Cisco Nexus switch which can be used in vSphere 4. It resides on a server and integrates with the hypervisor to deliver VN-Link virtual machine-aware network services.

Yesterday Cisco revealed more details about their Unified Computing System. The term was announced some time ago but nobody really knew what Cisco was planning. Some people even thought that Cisco was about to take over VMware as we already talked about in this article. Luckily this is not the case and even the opposite is true.

Cisco and VMware join forces in Cisco’s Unified Computing System which will incorporate product engineering and integrated sales and support strategies for datacenter virtualization and unified computing. The resulting combination of the Cisco Unified Computing System with VMware’s virtualization platform will provide customers with access to a unique and powerful virtualized and physical computing system over an intelligent, unified network fabric.

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Today we did our first Hands-on-Lab. Last year these labs were fully booked so we decided to hit the lab early this year.

This lab was based around the Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch, which brings back network administration to network administrators.

Erik did the Cisco Nexus 1000v lab today. Since we didn’t receive any beta material yet this is our first real experience with the new virtual switch by Cisco.The switch is based on NX-OS so network administrators can use it just like they configure their other switches.

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After the earlier news that Cisco was enlarging its stake in VMware now the news gets out that Intel sold half of its shares.

Intel disclosed that it had recently sold 1 million shares in the virtualization software maker and plans to sell another 3.75 million VMware shares on the open market. 500.000 of these shares were bought by Cisco. Another 500.000 were bought by EMC, VMware’s mother company.

After the rumors of Intel buying VMware from EMC one has to wonder what the future has in store for VMware. Also Cisco’s membership of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program and the expansion of shares gives enough to speculate about.

Looking for information about iSCSI, Cisco and VMware I stumbled onto a document which I want to share with all of you. Want to know about vswitches, portgroups, security, ether channels, scalability, security, performance, VLAN tagging, N-port ID virtualization, iSCSI implementations?

In ‘VMware Infrastructure 3 in a Cisco Network Environment‘ all ins and out of VMware networking are described. 90 pages of pure networking wisdom.

Another valueable document I found is the VMware iSCSI Design Considerations and Deployment Guide. When you are designing and /or implementing an iSCSI solution this is a document you should read.