Data Center Links: Virtual Blog Post

With some big announcements from Cisco and VMWare, it was a big day for virtualization. Before getting to the press releases, I went back and searched my blog for posts on virtualization -- and I found some interesting things. In July 2007 I tried to comprehend all of the virtualization technologies available in a summary post. I left a place holder for virtual networks because I really didn't get that one yet, but there was a foretelling blog post by Peter Christy on 'how' to virtualize a network.

Well -- all of that IOS engineering that Peter talked about appears to have been worked out and Cisco had a couple of big announcements today. First, they announced the new Nexus 1000V, a virtual software switch ; an industry first 3rd party virtual distributed switch. The joint Cisco/VMWare announcement was made today at the VMWorld conference. Check out the Cisco page on the 1000V - they do a nice job of explaining the technology. DatacenterKnowledge has a nice post on the announcement as well.

The second announcement was about new Data Center 3.0 technologies for Storage Area Networks. The new technologies are intended to enhance SAN Services in Virtual Machine environments. Building on the unified data center fabric:

'The new Cisco SAN technology includes three Cisco MDS 9000 Family 8-Gigabit-per-second (8-Gbps) Fibre Channel switching modules and new capabilities in Cisco’s SAN operating system, which has been re-branded NX-OS. These new SAN capabilities, combined with Cisco’s data center-class MDS and Nexus platforms, will help IT managers evolve towards a single operating system and a unified data center fabric, simplifying data center management and reducing costs."

The 3 new Cisco modules are a 24 or 48 port 8-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module, and a 4/44 Port 8-Gbps Host-Optimized Fibre Channel Switching Module. CNNMoney has an article on the press release here.

Cisco stock fared pretty well today and I found a financial analysis of Cisco through July 2008 at financial-guages.com.

VMWare announced their Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS -- because we need a few more acronyms in the industry). "The Virtual Datacenter OS allows businesses to efficiently pool all types of hardware resources - servers, storage and network – into an aggregated on-premise cloud – and, when needed, safely federate workloads to external clouds for additional compute capacity. Datacenters running on the Virtual Datacenter OS are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing." Check out the complete press release here. Another announcement they made was their vCloud Initiative for Enterprise-class Cloud Computing. It's a pretty cool initiative -- the press release can be found here. In a VMWorld keynote, President Paul Maritz described internal and external clouds, as well as "giant computers" :) VMWare stock ended up 2.41% for the day.

The blogosphere was busy with all of this news as well:

Cisco Data Center Blog (also some cool new information on an acronym sure to compete with World of Warcraft -- Cisco's Windows on WAAS)