Cisco Doubles Down on Microsoft Cloud OS

Siva Sivakumar, director of UCS Solutions at Cisco, told ServerWatch that Cisco is now doubling down on Microsoft technologies.

“The early ramp-up of UCS was primarily centered around work we had done with VMware,” Sivakumar said. “With Server 2012, obviously Microsoft has put out a platform that is a lot more data-center ready, and we are clearly seeing customer demand for it.”

One of the things that Cisco is now doing to improve support for Windows Server 2012 is  enabling the Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch for Microsoft’s Hyper-V. To date, the Nexus 1000v has only been available for VMware. Cisco has been working with Microsoft since 2011 on the virtual switch for Windows support.

Cisco is now enabling its Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) for Hyper-V as well.

“VM-FEX allows a hypervisor bypass for I/O,” Sivakumar said. “So if a VM wants to do an I/O it can go straight to the adapter on the server, delivering better performance and lower latency.”

Read the full story at ServerWatch:
Cisco Expands UCS Servers for Microsoft

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.