During VMworld 2008 Cisco announced its virtual switch for ESX 4.0, called the Nexus 1000V, which is a a piece of software built on NX-OS, that plugs into ESX and that can be configured through the familiar Cisco command line interface.
Now that Microsoft announced the upcoming functionality in Windows Server 8, Cisco announced it will extend the Nexus 1000V to Microsofts hypervisor Hyper-V as well.
The Nexus 1000V Series Switches contains several components:
- Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM), a software switch at the hypervisor level
- Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM), capable of managing network policies and Quality of Service (QoS) for VMs using the VEM.
- Virtual Security Gateway (VSG), provides multitenant access, with zone based security policies for VMs
- Virtual Wide Area Application Services (vWAAS), which is a WAN optimization solution.