Cisco and VMware Deliver Solution to Simplify Management of Network Services for Cloud Environments

SAN JOSE, Calif. and PALO ALTO, Calif., April 21, 2009 - Cisco and VMware today announced that the Cisco Nexus® 1000V virtual switch will be supported in VMware vSphereTM 4, which is being announced today. The combined solution is designed to help customers simplify virtualization and network services management for cloud environments. VMware vSphere 4 is the industry's first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service in the data center to help reduce IT costs while increasing IT responsiveness.

Highlights / Key Facts:

VMware will resell the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch with Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) capabilities as an integrated option in VMware vSphere 4.

VMware vSphere 4 is the first virtualization platform that will enable the Nexus 1000V to extend Cisco's security, policy enforcement, automated provisioning and diagnostics features into dynamic VMware cloud environments, scaling to support thousands of active virtual machines. With a wide range of groundbreaking new capabilities, VMware vSphere 4 will bring cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary, non-disruptive way - delivering uncompromising control with greater efficiency while preserving customer choice.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch with VN-Link technology is designed to integrate with VMware vSphere 4 to create a logical network infrastructure enabling network, virtualization and server teams to gain efficiency in the following ways:

Set and enforce connection policies for each virtual machine across a data center.

Dynamically and easily apply policy-based configuration and operation of network services (traditionally available in Cisco physical hardware switches) to each virtual machine.

Obtain accurate, real-time data for stronger collaboration in monitoring and troubleshooting.

Easily manage virtual machine connectivity across physical servers during routine hardware maintenance or to balance server workloads for optimized application performance and availability.

Cisco and VMware are also collaborating to support their shared channel partner communities by developing Cisco Nexus online training and demonstration labs that feature the Cisco Nexus 1000V, VMware vSphere 4 as well as the Cisco Nexus 5000 and 2000.

Cisco and VMware have teamed to offer education services and certifications for individuals and channel partners in support of customers' data center virtualization strategies.

Cisco has become a VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) partner and will offer the full suite of VMware consulting services. Cisco and VMware have also combined their expertise in networking and virtualization to deliver a joint set of consulting services to help customers rapidly assess, plan and design server, network, and storage virtualization solutions across their data centers. These joint services provide an end-to-end architecture roadmap to a virtualized data center and can help customers reduce costs by provisioning new applications quickly and more securely, while providing high levels of application performance.

Availability and Pricing

The Cisco Nexus 1000V will be available from Cisco and VMware later in the second quarter of 2009.

VMware will sell the combined solution at US$695 per processor for use with VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus. VMware is also offering some limited-time promotional offers for the combined solution. For more information, customers can contact their VMware sales representatives.

Executive Quotes:

"Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch simplifies the operations of both physical and virtual networking infrastructures enabling collaboration between server, virtualization and networking administrators and accelerating server virtualization," said Soni Jiandani, vice president of Marketing, Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit for Cisco. "Combined with the new VMware vSphere 4 platform, the solution is designed to give IT managers the tools needed to virtualize 100 percent of their applications today."

"VMware vSphere 4 combined with Cisco Nexus 1000V will offer customers a virtual data center architecture to simplify the delivery of IT services," said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit, VMware. "Network administrators will have access to familiar management solutions as they expand their virtualization footprint with VMware and Cisco. This collaboration with Cisco is a key building block in our strategy to partner with industry leaders to complement VMware's cloud operating system with management of physical and virtualized resources."

Supporting Quotes:

"The combination of VMware vSphere 4 and Cisco's Nexus 1000V is simply a revolution in computing that is provided by two unbeatable players that have the same vision of the datacenter," said Julien Mousqueton, Technical Solutions Architect for AGRICA. "The combination of these two solutions allows our IT teams to discover new benefits to virtualized infrastructure because we can now administer a network in a virtual environment the same way as we have done in the physical world-it is simplified and intuitive."

"VMware vSphere 4 with Cisco Nexus 1000V is lightning-fast -- both in terms of network and data storage," said Olivier Parcollet, Information System Manager for SETAO. "The Cisco Nexus 1000V allows us to gain full control of both the physical and virtual aspects of our infrastructure, driving us toward 100 percent virtualization with stronger security and increased application and resource availability."

"Cisco and VMware's collaborative approach to driving and delivering integrated virtualization solutions for the data center is unparalleled in the industry," said Bob Olwig, vice president of Corporate Business Development for World Wide Technology, Inc. "With this latest offering we are now better positioned to meet our customer's virtualization requirements helping them to lower costs and increase their business agility."