Cisco's integration with VMware Infrastructure 3 offers customers enhanced IT automation capabilities, including added VMware ESX Server capacity on demand, as well as configuration of network services, Cisco of San Jose, California said. Customers will benefit from increased IT agility and flexibility, faster coordinated provisioning of storage and network resources, and improved business continuance, the company said.

Cisco and VMware share a joint vision for driving and supporting a service-oriented approach for the data center, Cisco said. Together the efforts of the two companies will support the IT collaboration that is required across organizations to streamline operations and take advantage of the data center technology advancements to come, the company said.

Cisco is a provider of networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, the company said. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application service levels, efficiency and collaboration, the company said. Cisco and its partners are helping organizations to design and build virtualized, self-defending and efficient data center infrastructure for delivering superior application performance and user experience, it said.

Cisco VFrame DC is designed to reduce application deployment times, improve overall resource utilization, and offer greater business agility, Cisco said. With VFrame DC, customers can link their computer, networking and storage infrastructures together as a set of virtualized services. This services approach provides a simple way to view all the services configured at the application level to improve troubleshooting and change management, the company said. VFrame DC has four modular components, including design, discovery, deploy and operations, which are integrated together with a security interface that allows controlled access by multiple organizations, Cisco added.

Cisco began the technical collaboration with VMware as a result of customer feedback requesting a tighter integration with Cisco Catalyst and MDS technologies, to support the scaling of their VMware Infrastructure deployments, Cisco said. By adding service orchestration, Cisco VFrame DC can provision all the network services for Internet-facing applications running on VMware Infrastructure, including firewalls, content load balancing, switch and server trunks, and access control lists, from a single GUI (graphical user interface)-based service template, the company said. This integration enables network, storage and security IT groups to collaborate using a common design interface for improvements in real-time provisioning agility, the company added.

VMware customers want to rapidly provision and configure virtual infrastructure, VMware of Palo Alto, California said. With Cisco's integration of VFrame DC, customers get similar benefits for their physical infrastructure, the company said. VFrame DC enables coordinated provisioning of physical resources, including network, storage and server, to complement virtualized infrastructure, VMware added.

Through joint integration, VFrame DC loads VMware ESX Server onto bare-metal computer hardware, configures the physical server I/O (input/output) to utilize Cisco data center switches, and offers a two way policy API (Application Programming Interfaces) with VMware VirtualCenter to coordinate the configuration, Cisco said. VFrame DC can load VMware ESX Server onto physical hardware from a SAN (storage area network) in under ten minutes, the company said.

VFrame DC automatically configures the SAN back-end, including the SAN fabrics and the shared LUNs (logical unit numbers), based on design templates that are predefined by the storage and networking teams, Cisco said. Automating the addition of new VMware ESX Server instances based on demand, capacity, facilities, and high-availability policies enhances IT agility, as the servers can be brought up in minutes, automatically, with all of the virtual networking services configured, the company said.

As customers increasingly use live migration capabilities in their virtualization software, they will need to reconfigure the network, as VMs (virtual machines) move from one host to another, according to research firm, IDC of Framingham, Massachusetts. Dynamic reconfiguration such as that provided by Cisco VFrame DC will help close the security holes associated with live migration, and set the foundation for the next generation data center, IDC said.

Cisco will showcase the results of its collaborative efforts with VMware in a series of demonstrations, Cisco said.

The Cisco VFrame DC and VMware VirtualCenter solution automates virtual infrastructure provisioning for SANs and local area networks (LANs) for VMware ESX Server environments, as well as automated failover for physical servers hosting VMware ESX Server, Cisco said. The Cisco bi-directional VFrame DC API communicates with VMware VirtualCenter's VI API to orchestrate the provisioning of SAN and LAN networking requirements defined in service templates, the company said. This new version of VFrame DC will be available for customer evaluations later this year, with general availability early next year, the company added.

Cisco is also showing that the integration of the N Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and Cisco SAN Device Virtualization (SDV) enables the NPIV to allow a single F-port to communicate with multiple virtual HBAs (host bus adapters), allowing LUN assignment, zoning, and QoS (Quality of Service) to be managed similar to separate physical servers, while maintaining the cost advantages of virtualized server technology, Cisco said. Cisco SDV creates virtual SAN devices to accelerate swap out or failover to a replacement disk array, and to minimize downtime when replacing HBAs, or when re-hosting an application on a different server, the company said.

The virtual network services in VMware Environments allows service-oriented provisioning of network resources, such as firewalls and content load balancing, which enable centralized network resource consolidation to complement server consolidation and provide compelling cost reduction across the data center, Cisco said.

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