If you missed our webcast on the upcoming Nexus 1000V release for Microsoft Hyper-V, you missed the announcement that we are now making available a beta version to the general public, as of March 6. (Note: Everyone asks, so, no, we haven’t announced the availability date for the GA version yet, but it’s coming soon). This should be great news for the large number of folks that we had to turn away that we couldn’t support in our earlier alpha and high-touch beta releases.
In the webcast, Damian Flynn, a 2012 Microsoft MVP for Data Center and Cloud, and IT Architect for Lionbridge Technologies in Ireland, who was one of the early beta-testers for the Nexus 1000V Hyper-V version, gave an outstanding overview of the Nexus 1000V in a Hyper-V and System Center environment. It’s worth listening to the webcast replay if you have the time. Damian had some really exciting things to say about his experiences. The webcast was admirably co-hosted by our own Appaji Malla, product manager for Nexus 1000V for Hyper-V.
The new beta version is available to anyone with a valid email address, and who provide their company name and contact address. Beta users must be willing to test the product and provide constructive feedback. Beta users are also encouraged to participate in the discussion forums and contribute to the Nexus 1000V beta community site.
As described in this week’s webcast (download the slides here; or watch the replay here), the beta process starts with an email to: beta-n1kv-hyperv@cisco.com. A link to a beta site will be sent in an email invitation (you must have a userID on Cisco.com to access this site). You will then be prompted to accept the beta agreement, and then get access to the beta code and documentation. Please use the available discussion forums for support, questions and feedback. Read More »
Understanding the true capacity of an application and how it responds under stress is always top of mind for ISV’s as they bring solutions to market. Recently at Microsoft’s Partner Solutions Center (MPSC) in Redmond we and our partners X-IO and Scalability Experts worked with ISV Riversand Technologies to provide the ‘hard proof’ that their SQL Server based retail application could scale to expected demands.
Comprised of UCS servers for compute, Windows Server and SQL Server for the Microsoft stack, and X-IO storage system components we worked with the technical staff of Scalability Experts and our aforementioned partners to execute a comprehensive benchmark test on the Riversand solution MDMCenter.
The joint benchmark test not only confirmed MDMCenter solutions capabilities, but additionally showcased its speed and scalability that exceeded all expectations of the aspects that the benchmark aimed to measure. Read the case study here and learn how Cisco UCS, working with our technology partners, can deliver high-end SQL Server performance.
Visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft to learn more on Cisco’s technologies and solutions for Microsoft environments.
In conjunction with the newly expanded partnership with Citrix, Cisco demonstrated its Nexus 1000V virtual switch on the Citrix XenServer virtualization platform based on the Xen hypervisor, with XenCenter integration this week at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona. This is another important milestone in Cisco’s multi-hypervisor strategy for its full Nexus 1000V virtual networking portfolio, following on the heels of our support for Microsoft Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 (currently in beta) and the demonstration of Nexus 1000V on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) open source hypervisor for Linux at Cisco Live in San Diego earlier this year.
The demonstration at Synergy showed the consistent deployment architecture for the Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch, NX-OS feature-set, operational workflows, and port profile based provisioning of virtual Ethernet ports (vEths) via XenCenter. Two virtual workloads – Ubuntu server and Windows Client – were shown to interact with each other as in the diagram below.
The new beta version is available to anyone with a valid email address, and who provide their company name and contact address. Beta users must be willing to test the product and provide constructive feedback. Beta users are also encouraged to participate in the discussion forums and contribute to the Nexus 1000V beta community site.
