I am trying to get my company’s session approved for this year’s VMWorld. When you aren’t a Platinum sponsor, it is a little bit more difficult to get these things pushed though. So, I am asking for help from anyone who has a VMWorld account to go and vote for the session. Many of you have been asking me what Nicira is up to. This session is a great way to find out. Here are the session details and link to cast your vote.
Title: Reworking the Network to Support Today’s Virtualization & Cloud Demands
Speaker: Martin Casado, Nicira CTO and Founder
Company: Nicira
Session Id: PC8430
Abstract: “The networking industry is lagging far behind the virtualization trends which are transforming our datacenters into pure resource pools of compute power. Traditional approaches to networking hamper the adoption of virtualization with scaling and mobility limitations, vendor lock-in on hardware platforms & management APIs, and an inability to seamlessly bridge physical and virtual topologies. This session will review a networking architecture that offer the guarantees of the physical network, while retaining the flexibility of the cloud. Solutions will be described which tackle problems such as providing strict isolation, bridging physical networks, providing accurate SLAs and billing information, and offering inter-subnet migration with persistent IP addresses. In this talk, real world experiences designing & building multi-tenant virtual networking infrastructures which scale to hundreds of thousands of virtual machines and tens of thousands of tenants will also be discussed. “
Now that the VMware ESX vSphere 4.0 U1 update has been released, customers are moving from 3.0 and 3.5 to 4.0 at a very accelerated pace. U1 means that the technology is stable, the kinks have been worked out and gremlins have moved on to terrorize something else. It is also a major mental barrier (like Service Packs in the Windows world). Now that the barrier has been removed, there are a lot more fact and experience based analysis coming from users championing for and against new features and solutions inside of the vSphere 4 offering.
A great example of this is captured over at Search Networking comparing 2 separate articles. The first, by Bob Plankers (lead Linux and VMware systems engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he also runs The Lone Sysadmin blog) is why the VMware vSwitch is good enough for most. The 2nd, by David Davis (a virtualization author), does a good job of articulating the why the Benefits outweigh the extra cost of Cisco Nexus 1000V.
In addition to David points, I would add one point of clarification which Bob might not be aware of. The Nexus 1000V is sold and serviced through both VMware and Cisco. In fact, VMW offers a couple of bundles of the Nexus 1000V with the vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses (both full license and upgrade license). When VMW sells the Nexus 1000V with the vSphere software, they also sell support (in conjunction with the vSphere support). Both the VMW and Cisco support teams are trained on the Nexus 1000V at the same time and both equally capable of handling support issues. And if things get really tricky, the Cisco TAC backs up VMW’s support organization with a direct line into our engineering department.
Oh, one other thing. The latest release of the Nexus 1000V software (1.2) includes a simple GUI to allow you to complete the initial config in about 7 minutes. There is a VOD posted here to show just how easy it is:
I have been a little quiet here for the past 2 months since VMWorld in San Francisco in September. The Nexus 1000V team has been very busy this past quarter working with customer (we have added over 400 new customers in this period) and preparing for our next release which is going to post to Cisco CCO in the first part of December. I am happy to report that HP got it’s facts straight about how the Nexus 1000V really does work with their Virtual Connect and Flex-10 solutions (it might have been the Cisco video we posted showing the solutions working together that helped things along – see below).
Also, I have been surprised that there has not been much noise following all the announcements made at VMworld 2009 about an “open” vswitch or any of the management veneers that promised to make a standard VMware vSwitch support all of the features of the Nexus 1000V. Maybe Santa will bring us a gift and deliver some specific product details this holiday season so we can understand what these solutions really can or can’t do.
The dull roar is starting to increase in volume and we are still 5 days from the start of VMWorld 2009 in San Francisco. Lots of vaporware being thrown around over the past couple of days, but it is good to see the virtual network space starting to get some more attention. For today, in an attempt to ground the virtualization networking community in some reality, I thought I would provide links to a couple of new factual documents about the Nexus 1000V.
