Expanding on a strategic relationship and engineering collaboration that spans more than four years, the companies, in conjunction with industry partners, have unveiled what they describe as 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: 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 computer 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.
“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.”
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.