Recently there are many confusion about these new terms VN-Link & Cisco nexus 1000V which been widely communicated to the IT user groups. Where were the confusion come from? Most of the time, we are getting confuse about what is VN-Link meant by Cisco. Below is some short description you may want to refer to.
Cisco Nexus 1000V is a enhance virtual distributed virtual switch which integrate to the VMware vSphere 4. With Cisco Nexus 1000V, you will contain VSM and VEM, which VSM will be the virtual appliances that host the management of Nexus 1000V, and VEM will be installed on each ESX host that been connected to the Nexus 1000V. I will not go in too details about Nexus 1000V in this post as my intention is to clear up the confusion on the VN-Link meant by Cisco.
VMware had done the best job since they introduced vmotion and cold migration which allow us to move the state of the virtual machine from 1 Host to another with or without down time. In virtualization, it encapsulated the entire Server into the virtual machine format and it is hardware independent. Therefore you can always move from 1 host to another without having re-install or reconfigure your operating system or application.
Well, since we had achieved this in virtual environment, what about physical environment?
Today, 10 G Ethernet consider as common technology at least to the enterprise customer. Many of us are looking into 10G Ethernet from server to switch via L2 or L3 networking perspective. The main reason behind this are due to the Virtualization and Cloud Computing technology driven. Few years ago when we came out the design with multiple gigabits NICs on the ESX host to support NIC teaming, load balancing and etc, which may end up deliver around 14 Gbps of network bandwidth and 8Gbps of FC bandwidth per host. Each ESX host are consolidate 20 to 30 virtual machines. At that time, this may be the best option we could had done due to technology limitation. Is this design GOOD enough? I will say yes for previously, and NO for today technology availability.
Photo shot of the real environment which have 14 gigabits NIC Ports and 4 x 2 Gbps FC.
Intel had launched the latest chipset 5600 series recently. Original I was thought that all the new chipset should come with 6 cores per physical CPU. Luckily I did my research just now and found that not all Intel 5600 series will come with 6 cores. Only specified model will have 6 cores in place. I attach the picture as a reference for you all. Have fun
