Today, we announced we will be delivering VM networking support for Hyper-V in Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8.  Specifically, we are working with Microsoft to deliver integrated support for the Nexus 1000V and VM-FEX technology in their next generation server platform, thus extending the benefits customers have seen from both these technologies to another server/hypervisor environment.  For more info, check out the announcement and this brief and this Q&A.

With this latest announcement, we offer (or will offer) Nexus 1000V functionality for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V as well as VM-FEX support for those two hypervisors and RedHat Enterprise Virtualization.  For folks building out virtualization architectures and cloud environments, we think this is a key benefit, since it maintains their choice and flexibility and allows them to build out hyper-visor agnostic infrastructure that delivers consistent features and functionality.

So, that’s about it for now. Stay tuned to this space and we’ll keep you apprised as things progress.

Tags: data center, Data Center Business Advantage, Hyper-V, Nexus 1000v, virtualization, VM-FEX

A guest post by:

Appaji Malla, Nexus Product Manager
Arnab Basu, UCS Product Manager

At last week’s Microsoft Build event in Anaheim, CA. we presented & demonstrated our Cisco Nexus 1000V and Cisco UCS VM-FEX technologies running on Windows 8 Server Hyper-V.

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Tags: Cisco, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Nexus 1000v, virtualization, VM-FEX, Windows 8

Virtualizating Microsoft SQL on Cisco UCS,  The Usual Suspects of why people don’t virtualize SQL Server

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Tags: Cisco, Cisco UCS, Data Warehouse, Hyper-V, Microsoft SQL Server, OLTP, Server Consolidation, SQL, SQL Server 2008R2, UCS, UCS B250 M2, virtualization, VMware vSphere

As many of you know, a big part of the UCS story revolves around the flexibility we’ve built into the UCS management model.  While we hear great feedback from customers about the native UCS management GUI, we know that many of you have already invested lots of time in building automated solutions to repetitive IT tasks.  To that end, we want to help you find ways to use the tools and processes that have already been built along side of UCS.

We know that many of our customers are already running Microsoft applications on top of UCS.  For many of you, that means that you’re also likely automating repetitive tasks using Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting language.  PowerShell is an immensely powerful tool in an IT admin’s bag of tricks.  Introduced back in 2006, it has matured to become common across not only Microsoft’s business software, but also among their partner community -- including NetApp, Quest Software, and even VMWare.

Shortly after we brought UCS to market, we got a specific request from an early adopter to build out PowerShell support for UCS .  Here on the team, nothing moves us faster than feedback directly from our customers, so it got the cogs turning and we’re happy to announce our first public release of the PowerShell Management Toolkit for UCSM.  We decided to even take that a step farther -- besides providing PowerShell support, we’ve also made available .NET managed code that can be used to natively build UCS support into a .NET application.  For the rest of the post, I’m going to spend some time talking about some of the nifty ways in which UCS PowerShell provider can be used.  Fair warning here, folks -- we’re about to get technical

For the brave among you, read on……

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Tags: Hyper-V, Microsoft, PowerShell, UCS, Windows

Microsoft TechEd 2011 was a great opportunity to talk to customers about Cisco UCS and Microsoft applications. We had  so many attendees come by the booth and ask questions about UCS that we meet out target goal of customer engagments within the first two days.  I was surprised how many people did not realize the depth of the platform or the integration points we provide from both an application and consolidation standpoint.

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Tags: Cisco Developer Network, Cisco Validated Designs, goUCS, Hyper-V, Microsoft SQL Server R2 Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0, Opalis, PowerShell, UCS, UCS B250 M2, UCS Manager