With the upcoming new version of ESX on the horizon, Cisco published more an more detail on the Nexus 1000V. The Nexus 1000V is Cisco’s virtual switch which intergrates directly with ESX creating one distributed over all your ESX hosts. Besides this distrbuted switch Cisco also integrates the them in their management software. This gives network administrators the possibility to manage all switches, physical and virtual. Giving the power of networking  back to where it belongs; with the network admins.

More information about the Cisco Nexus 1000V can be found here. A nice video can be found here.

But during a presentation I attended Cisco also explained the Unified I/O concept. That was something that was new to me. But it’s going to be possible to combine network and storage traffic over one connection a.k.a. Unified I/O. Wow! That’s great. That would result in only two cables going into my server. But how does it work? Currently we have 10 Gbit available, but in the next year 40 / 100 Gbit will be introduced.

Combined with the ever growing capacity of CPU and RAM in servers this will result in VM host monsters. But how are all these new techonologies going to integrate with one another. Thankfully Brad Hedlund a Consulting System Engineer with Cisco and CCIE has written an article to explain this in detail. You can read about it here.

And as always a picture says more then a thousand words :