Cisco this week announced a new partnership with Microsoft to deliver the Nexus 1000V virtual switch and the Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) for Hyper-V environments. The effort is not for currently shipping version of Windows Server, but rather is for the upcoming Windows Server 8 which is still in development.
The Nexus 1000v was first announced back in 2008 for VMware. The 1000v is a virtual switch for virtual machine traffic.
“Really this is a testament to the integration that we’re bringing together into the Hyper-V environment for Windows Server 8 next year,” Prashant Gandhi, senior director product marketing said.
As to why Cisco has chosen to wait for Server 8 instead of making a version of its virtual switch available for current versions of Hyper-V, it has to do with new capabilities coming from Microsoft. Gandhi said that Server 8 will include a new Hyper-V extensibility framework that benefits switching.