VMware and Cisco Collaborate on Cloud Platform - VXLAN

Submitted by Patrick on Thu, 09/01/2011 - 07:29

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.

VXLAN Features:

  • Virtual Extensible Local Area Network, or VXLAN, is the next major step in the path towards 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.

On-demand cloud infrastructure: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.

Tags: