Cisco and Microsoft cooperate to bring network-layer management to Hyper-V

20.09.2011
looks promising enough that it is queuing up two new products designed to extend its network controls to Hyper-V virtual environments when releases Windows Server 8 sometime next year.

Cisco will offer two ways to peer inside Hyper-V physical machines to mine network-layer information about Hyper-V virtual machines and to extend Cisco network-layer monitoring, management and configuration to them.

The first is a version of Cisco's switch designed to support Hyper-V. It is a distributed virtual switch that fits Hyper-V virtual machines with virtual Ethernet cards that can be managed via another component of the switch, Cisco's Virtual Supervisor Module.

WINDOWS SERVER 8:

The supervisor module is tightly integrated with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Cisco says, which will enable customers to set separate privileges for different classes of administrators. The Virtual Supervisor Module can be deployed on a physical appliance or on a virtual machine. The entire distributed switch can be hosted on a Cisco physical appliance called Nexus 1010 Virtual Services Appliance.

The combination gives current administrators in Cisco shops easier management of the virtual machines because they can deal with them via Cisco NX-OS software that they are already familiar with, Cisco says. The virtual machines seem as if they are extensions of the physical network, making it easier to enforce policies, provision and diagnose problems on the virtual machines, Cisco says. Rather than deal with the virtual environment separately, it is brought under one umbrella.