Red Hat Summit, Nexus 1000V and All Things Open

This week kicked off with a trip to Boston and Red Hat Summit where Cisco is talking about our partnership with Red Hat on open source projects including OpenStack, and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. I’m here to highlight some of our Nexus 1000V virtual networking innovations that involve Red Hat open source distributions of red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), KVM and OpenStack.

As you probably know, Cisco started shipping the Nexus 1000V virtual switch for Microsoft Hyper-V this month (and it won a Best of TechEd Show award at Microsoft’s TechEd conference). But open source virtualization and cloud infrastructure platforms continue to be an important strategy for our entire data center portfolio here at Cisco. KVM will be the next hypervisor that we’ll ship our Nexus 1000V virtual switch on, and the rest of the Red Hat open source cloud infrastructure will be an important part of our open strategy, and that includes Red Hat Linux and their Red Hat OpenStack distribution.

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls all the infrastructure—compute, storage, and networking—resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a central dashboard. The Nexus 1000V virtual switch will have REST API’s available that work with the OpenStack Network API (Quantum) plug-in. Nexus 1000V on KVM will initially be targeted at service providers who are adopting open source infrastructures and who require greater scalability in their data centers. Nexus 1000V on KVM is looking to support up to 16-32k ports per Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) on 256-512 servers with 300+ veth/server.

As open cloud platforms continue to grow in importance, we also have a great public webinar coming up next week on Tuesday, June 18 at 9 AM Pacific, called “Open Source in Networked Environments” as part of our Open Network Environment (Cisco ONE) webinar series. (Register here). Our distinguished panel of speakers will be  Michael Enescu, CTO Open Source Initiative, Cisco Systems; Daniel Frye, VP, Open Systems Development, IBM; and Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Linux Foundation. During the hour, we will explore the mechanics behind open source projects and communities, what these technologies mean to customers, and what vendors like Cisco and IBM are doing in this space, including an overview of the recently announced OpenDaylight project.

If you don’t know about the OpenDaylight project yet (cool video here), it’s an open source project under the Linux Foundation with the mutual goal of furthering the adoption and innovation of Software Defined Networking (SDN) through the creation of a common market-supported framework. Platinum and gold sponsors include Cisco, Big Switch, Brocade, Citrix, Ericsson, IBM, Juniper, Microsoft, NEC, Red Hat, and VMware. As part of the OpenDaylight project and to support open source projects for cloud infrastructure, Cisco has contributed the source for its Cisco ONE OpenFlow controller.

If we don’t see you this week in Boston, we’ll look for you online next week at the webinar. And if you miss both of those, I certainly hope you can get to Cisco live in Orlando in two weeks! It’s going to be a busy rest of the month…