Meet the Cisco Nexus 1010, a switch

One of the products that generated a fair number of questions with last week’s announcement was our Nexus 1010. Since I got a number of very similar questions, let me answer them all here at once.

So, lets start with a quick recap. The Nexus 1000 switch architecture is modeled after a modular switch such as our Catalyst 6500 or Nexus 7000—the N1K series does, in fact, run NX-OS like the rest of the Cisco Nexus and Cisco MDS families. Like a modular switch, we have virtualized line cards we call Virtual Ethernet Modules (VEM) which is the software that replaces the vSwitch in a vSphere host. We also have virtualized supervisor modules calledm strangely enough, Virtual Supervisor Modules that provide management and control plane functions (they don’t get involved in packet forwarding). Prior to the Nexus 1010, the VSM software has run as a virtual appliance on a handy server in the data center. more....