Cisco, VMware team on network virtualization

August 30, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO—Cisco Systems Inc. and VMware Inc. said Tuesday (Aug. 30) they have expanded their strategic relationship to create new technology for network virtualization that will broaden the mobility range of virtual machines across multiple datacenters and cloud environments.

The companies said their Virtual Extensible Local Area Network, or VXLAN, is the next major step in the path towards logical, virtual networks that can be created on-demand, enabling enterprises to utilize computing and storage capacity for mission critical applications.

VXLAN will scale to meet the millions of logical networks required to run applications in the cloud with efficient utilization of network resources, according to the firms. VXLAN will also support applications running in hybrid clouds where compute capacity is delivered from pools of resources that may span across private and public clouds, the companies said.  

"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 for server access in Cisco's Virtualization Technology Group, 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."

VMware demonstrated the VXLAN technology Tuesday at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

VXLAN technology in Cisco Nexus 1000V will be available for beta in September, the companies said. VMware View 5 is expected to be generally available later in the third quarter of 2011, according to the companies.