Rich Miller made a point I wanted to echo in a recent post:”Maritz and the VMware organization has proven their ability to retake some thought leadership and generate momentum.”Heading into VMworld, there were certainly some questions hanging out there with the changes in leadership and other competitive pressures. However, Paul and his team did an outstanding job re-casting the conversation and sending several thousand re-charged evangelists back out into the industry.

What a hectic but fun week at VMworld. The show finally ended yesterday, they were turning out the lights and ripping up the carpet and we still had folks lined up for Nexus 1000V demos--gotta love that.So, beyond the buzz around VN-Link and the Nexus 1000V, we had significant traffic to a number of the demo pods:Considering the audience, its not surprising that there was a lot of interest in the joint development work we have been doing with VMware to accelerate VDI traffic. The net results is a 60-70% increase in performance. You can get more details here.One of the things that will have some interesting implications down the road is making NX-OS our single data center operating system. We now have single OS that spans switching (Nexus 5K/7K), storage (MDS) and servers (Nexus 1000V). As noted in an earlier post, NX-OS 4.1 was part of our Best of Show award for New Technology.Finally, there was significant interest in the unified fabric/FCoE pod. So, we now have the Emulex, Intel and QLogic adaptors on the ESX HCL, was have FCoE support in ESX 3.5-U2, and we expect EMC certification in October. The interesting thing was a shift in the questions we were getting from”what” and”why?” (which is what we have been getting) to”how”, so it seems like folks are starting to get comfortable with the concept and starting to understand the benefits.Somewhere out there, there is a slot machine with my name on it, so, signing-off for now…

Cisco and Microsoft, long time partners, are happy to share that we have taken the next steps to bring our joint solution, Windows Server on WAAS (WoW), to market. We’ve developed a new, independent website with a wide range of information: www.WindowsServerOnWaas.com. The vision for this solution was first announced on February 26, 2008 at the launch of Windows Server 2008 (aka Longhorn).What Is WoW? What excites us about WoW is that it combines key branch IT services from Windows Server 2008 with Cisco’s leading WAN optimization solution, WAAS. This is a first of its kind offering where our joint customers can now run Windows Server branch IT services on a WAN optimization appliance from Cisco, the same way they would run Windows Server on a physical (white or branded box) server, but with substantially lower operating costs and much greater flexibility for locating individual IT services. You can call this the”branch version” of what many have been blogging about today — at the opposite end of the computing spectrum — Windows Server on midsize and supercomputers. Windows Server on WAAS — which is available and shipping — helps businesses improve the user experience in branch offices — and equally important, it helps IT teams reduce their branch IT costs and complexity. Customers now have the flexibility of maintaining key Windows services such as printing, authentication and DNS/DHCP services in a very efficient manor on a network appliance in the branch while still consolidating much of their technology infrastructure in data centers.More Choices = More Wins The ability for customers to make their own decision about centralization vs. localization of IT services allows them to design their branch IT infrastructure according to their business’ unique objectives and requirements, as well as cost priorities and IT footprint. For example, a customer might be able to centralize email services at the data center for branch employees to access remotely, and at the same time locally host Windows print services on Cisco WAAS at the branch.IT Services + WAN Optimization = Perfect MatchWindows Server on WAAS helps optimize application and IT service performance and reliability. Because WoW leverages Cisco’s strong set of WAN optimization technologies, WoW can really impact the performance of centralized applications, as well as those users might want to centralize as part of this IT project. Says one major US financial services company:”Windows Server on WAAS can offer flexibility to optimally locate IT resources, by moving servers to the data center but still maintaining local branch IT services. Based on our evaluation, one could achieve this flexibility with a minimal learning curve as Windows Server management on Cisco WAAS is the same as on a physical server.”œCisco and Microsoft are looking forward to rolling out Windows Server on WAAS and addressing customers’ branch needs and challenges with a flexible, innovative joint solution.

Quick update--the Cisco Nexus 1000V, VN-Link, and NX-OS 4.1 just won “Best of Show” for Best New Technology at VMworld 2008. Details here.

Some of our readers and other bloggers got parts of what we are announcing today right. I, of course, have to wait until the prescribed time- i.e. 1:30 Pacific Time today, before I can write too much about it other than gratuitous teasers and such, but Rich Miller over at Data Center Knowledge wrote a good piece on what we are bringing to market- including enhancements to our Nexus line of data center switching (Nexus 7000, Nexus 5000, and a rumored Nexus 1000V)The one thing I am most excited about, and may be a bit early (but I just can’t contain myself and we’ll see if my PR team jumps on me for it) is how we are expanding NX-OS across our data center portfolio. NX-OS was rooted in SAN-OS. We started from a base of SAN-OS and then built new Layer-3 code from a Procket base on top of it, making sure everything was modular, multi-threaded, endian-independent, and protected by a stateful memory protection architecture that allows processes to restart and re-sync their last known memory table state without topology reconstruction. With the 4.1 release MDS SANs and Nexus LANs come together under common operational guidelines, common software architecture, same release trains, etc. The same AAA features you depend on for LAN security and integrity of management domains take effect on the SAN side and so on. This was a four-year journey to get right. Glad to see some companies will just be starting once they finalize their acquisition work. It’s a long road to do it right, I do hope they take the chance and don’t cut too many corners… time will tell.dg