Cisco plans virtual switching for Microsoft's Hyper-V

Cisco is to bring its virtual switch to Hyper-V next year when Microsoft's Windows Server 8 is released, according to media reports on Tuesday. The new support for Hyper-V will only apply to the forthcoming Windows Server 8, which introduces greater ability to integrate third-party modules than its predecessor, according to Cisco. Today, Hyper-V customers can use a virtual switch included with Microsoft’s hypervisor, and connect to Cisco physical switches and other Cisco products like the Unified Computing System. The new step of bringing Cisco virtual switch software to the hypervisor layer, however, will achieve greater visibility into virtual machines and better provisioning and management capabilities, Cisco says. With the Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch, Cisco is running a virtual switch inside of the hypervisor that, as far as the virtual machines are concerned, looks exactly like any other IOS-based switch from Cisco. “Cisco’s policy enforcement, automated provisioning and diagnostics features are available through Cisco Nexus 1000V, and will help IT administrators rapidly deploy virtual workloads in Windows Server Hyper-V environments and scale to very large data centers,” Cisco said in an announcement on Monday. All of Cisco's other virtual networking services -- Virtual Security Gateway, Adaptive Security Appliance, Wide Area Acceleration Service, and Network Analysis Module -- can plug into the Nexus 1000V.