Cisco and Hypervisors

Cisco announced some of the anticipated fruits of their partnership with VMware and their acquisition of Nuova (remember that Nuova's CTO Ed Bugnion was a VMware founder). As Ed says so well, server virtualization didn't break the applications but it certainly broke the infrastructure. A switch and network management system that can't see the virtual NIC's on virtual servers isn't very useful, so in this tranche of announcements Cisco remedied a lot of those problems with the introduction of a distributed virtual switch (software) that the physical Cisco data center switches can see and manage. It's an important step forward for virtual infrastructure, although we suspect just the first step.