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VMware and Cisco Collaborate on Cloud Innovation

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01-Sep-2011

Photo: VMware Virtualisation

Range of technology innovations and integrated solution enhancements result from four-year strategic relationship

LAS VEGAS, Nev., — Today at VMworld® 2011, 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.

Key Facts:

VXLAN: Network Virtualization Breakthrough

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.

Cisco and VMware Record Virtualization Performance:

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) has set a new world record for the VMware VMmark® 2.1 benchmark, the industry standard cloud benchmark for performance.
Cisco UCS achieved the highest score ever recorded for the VMware VMmark 2.1 benchmark with a 21% performance advantage over other identical server core count.
The VMware VMmark 2.1 benchmark models a typical cloud environment, using key VMware vSphere® features such as VMware vMotion®, VMware Storage vMotion® and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler to balance the workload across the available resources in the cloud.

Expansion of the Cisco and VMware Desktop Virtualization Solutions

Desktop virtualization: Last November, Cisco and VMware announced a desktop virtualizationsolution based on Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) systemand VMware View™ 4.5. Cisco and VMware are expanding VXI solution to support VMware View 5 as well as integrations with Cisco suite of collaboration solutions.
Collaborative Workspace: VMware View with Cisco Unified Communications provide a collaborative workspace that will include call control and increased scalability with VMware vSphere 5, VMware View 5, Cisco Unified Communications (UC) and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS).
Virtual Desktop Clients:VMware View 5 will be available on Cisco Cius and Cisco Virtualization Experience Clients (VXC) 2100and 2200 endpoints to provide workers with highly secure, real-time access to business applications and content, anytime and anywhere, without compromise of the rich collaborative user experience.
Click-to-Call: VMware View with WebEx Connect 7 enables Click-To-Call communication between users running WebEx Connect inside VMware View virtual desktops, enabling users to communicate more effectively.

Cloud Infrastructure: Raising the Bar for Delivering IT as a Service

Enhanced cloud infrastructure platform: Cisco and VMware combined solutions have been enhanced with the latest VMware vSphere 5 and Cisco UCS 2.0 solutions to deliver a strong foundation for cloud computing. The enhanced solutions offer better cloud management capabilities to virtualize the most demanding business-critical applications and workloads.
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.
Secure Cloud Infrastructure: To further address security in multi-tenant cloud infrastructures, Cisco is demonstrating Virtual ASA firewall for Nexus 1000V and plans to integrate Cisco's Virtual ASA firewall with VMware vCloud Director.
Simplified management: Cisco UCS 2.0 automates hypervisor provisioning by integrating VMware vSphere 5 Auto Deploy with UCS Manager. Administrators may now deploy many VMware vSphere nodes linked to a single Auto Deploy boot image in a single operation as compared to many manual steps with traditional systems. This integration speeds IT service delivery and reduces opportunities for errors by enforcing server and network configuration policies with VMware vSphere images.

Supporting quotes:

"Together with VMware, Cisco has unlocked the power of the network to extend virtual machines beyond the confines of a single stack to the entire data center and cloud infrastructure from different locations. VXLAN will provide the ability to scale networking segments to millions of VMs to ease the deployment of applications in the cloud. Also, by segmenting these VMs and applications via highly secure virtual networks, customers will be able to achieve the security required for multi-tenant cloud environments," said Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Server, Access, Virtualization Technology Group for Cisco.

"Our partnership with Cisco has resulted in numerous technology innovations that are delivering strategic value across customer environments," said Raghu Raghuram, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Infrastructure and Management, VMware. "With the new and enhanced technology integrations announced today, we're continuing to help customers transform their datacenters for enterprise hybrid cloud computing and their desktops for the post-PC era."

Availability

Integrated Cisco and VMware cloud infrastructure and desktop virtualization solutions are available today from Cisco as well as qualified Cisco and VMware solution provider partners.

VXLAN technology in Cisco Nexus 1000V will be available for beta in September 2011.

VMware View 5 is expected to be generally available later in the third quarter of 2011.

Supporting Resources:

VXLAN whitepaper

Cisco and VMware Virtual Desktop solution

Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure

Cisco blogs: Cisco Data Center Networks

RSS Feed for Cisco: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/rss.html

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

About VMware

VMware (NYSE: VMW) delivers virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. With the industry leading virtualization platform – VMware vSphere® – customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2010 revenues of $2.9 billion, more than 250,000 customers and 25,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

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VMmark 2.1 statements based on results posted at http://www.vmmark.com as of 8/29/2011. Cisco UCS C460

M2 VMmark 2.1.1 result available at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/ps10265/ucs_vmark2_1.pdf.

VMware® VMmark® is a product of VMware, Inc.

Cisco, the Cisco logo, Cisco Systems, Cisco Unified Computing System, and WebEX are registered trademarks or trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. This document is Cisco Public Information.

VMware, VMware Storage vMotion, VMware View, VMware vCloud, VMware VMmark, VMware vMotion, VMware vSphere and VMworld are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.