VMware, Cisco Extend Partnership on Virtualization, Mission-Critical Cloud 
VMware and Cisco renewed their vows to collaborate on cloud and virtualization in Las Vegas last month. Executives unveiled solutions for desktop and network virtualization, as well as offerings to scale and secure cloud infrastructures for mission-critical data and applications.
The VMware/Cisco network virtualization technology is dubbed VXLAN, which the companies described as “the next major step in the path towards logical, virtual networks that can be created on-demand.”
VXLAN lets enterprises use computing and/or storage capacity for mission-critical applications across a number of use cases. “VXLAN will provide the ability to scale networking segments to millions of VMs to ease the deployment of applications in the cloud,” said Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Server, Access, Virtualization Technology Group for Cisco in a statement. “Also, by segmenting these VMs and applications via highly secure virtual networks, customers will be able to achieve the security required for multi-tenant cloud environments.”
Applications running in the cloud. Allows IT managers to control every user's access to data and applications with logical networks for each instance of the application. VXLAN will scale up to millions of logical networks required to run applications in the cloud with efficient utilization of network resources, the companies said.
Applications running in hybrid clouds. Where compute capacity is delivered from pools of resources that span private and public clouds, VXLAN will provide network encapsulation along with segment identifiers. This combination can create up to millions of logical networks, and can enable workloads to seamlessly move across and between datacenters and cloud infrastructures.
Multi-tenant environments. The VXLAN networking segments will support cloud infrastructures that support multi-tenants that require segmentation for added security and compliance.
On-demand cloud infrastructure. VXLAN technology will be supported in VMware vSphere 5, VMware vCloud Director 1.5 and Cisco’s Nexus 1000V virtual switch for an on-demand cloud infrastructure to enhance the end-user experience, and offer add-ons to simplify troubleshooting and management of applications running in the cloud.
VXLAN has been submitted for standardization at Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), where the draft VXLAN spec is available.
As for the virtualization for the desktop, VMware and Cisco said they are expanding the Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) to support VMware View 5. VMware View 5 will work with Cisco Unified Communications to provide a collaborative workspace with call control and increased scalability.
“With the new and enhanced technology integrations announced today, we’re continuing to help customers transform their datacenters for enterprise hybrid cloud computing and their desktops for the post-PC era,” added Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager for cloud infrastructure and management.
