Information About the System
Cisco Nexus 1000V provides Layer 2 switching functions in a virtualized server environment. Cisco Nexus 1000V replaces virtual switches within ESX servers and allows you to configure and monitor the virtual switch using the Cisco NX-OS command line interface. Cisco Nexus 1000V also gives you visibility into the networking components of the ESX servers and access to the virtual switches within the network.
Cisco Nexus 1000V manages a datacenter defined by the vCenter Server. Each server in the datacenter is represented as a linecard in Cisco Nexus 1000V and can be managed as if it were a line card in a physical Cisco switch. Cisco Nexus 1000V implementation has two components:
- Virtual supervisor module (VSM): This is the control software of the Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch. It runs on a virtual machine (VM) and is based on NX-OS.
- Virtual Ethernet module (VEM): This is the part of Cisco Nexus 1000V that actually switches data traffic. It runs on a VMware ESX host. Several VEMs are controlled by one VSM. All VEMs that form a switch domain should be in the same virtual data center as defined by VMware vCenter Server.