The joint venture between Cisco and VMware brought a new highly scalable product for networkers is Cisco Nexus 1000V. Cisco Nexus 1000V is a distributed virtual switch which is fully integrated within VMware Infrastructure.
The Cisco Nexus 1000V has 2 different modules, they are ;
Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM):-
Each hypervisor contains one VEM module and it is a software solution that effectively performs following tasks:
- Advance Networking
- Security
- Traffic switching between virtual machines
- Routing between rest of the network
Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) :-
The VSM is a standalone, physical or virtual module that performs the following functions for the Cisco Nexus 1000V system:
- Configuration
- Management
- Monitoring
- Integration with VMware
In the Cisco Nexus 1000V, traffic is switched between virtual machines locally at each VEM instance level. VEM also connects the local virtual machine with the rest of the network through the upstream network switch.
So, with this background on the architecture of Cisco Nexus 1000 V, the next step is deploying this as virtual switch on your ESX host. This blog is about step by step installation of Cisco 1000V on on the ESX host.
Pre-requisites:
Download the Cisco Nesus 1000 V by clicking here(Link). This will be a Zip file with the following name “Nexus1000v.4.2.1.SV1.4a”, extract the same and save it in a folder.
ESX or ESXi host should version 4.1 or above. Install Vspehere on the local machine and connect the ESX server using Vsphere.
Installing Cisco Nexus1000V:-
Step 1 :-
Connect the ESX host using Vcentre and click on File Menu at the top left corner. Click Deploy OVF template, Browse the location where you have extracted the Cisco 1000 V software downloaded from Cisco Website, Then select the correct OVF file and click next.
Step 2 :-
The install shield displays information on OVF template, product information, size on the disk etc, Click ‘Next’ and accept the End user License Agreement.
Steps 3 :-
Here you will be prompted enter the Nexus switch name and Location. Where you can specify the name and if you have multiple data center, you can data center on which you want to deploy the Nexus 1000 V.
Step 4 :-
Next step is selecting the data storage in which you are going to deploy the Nexus 1000V and also it will prompt you to select the disk format at the very next step. Here I ll be using Thin format, But you can select any one of the format, its up to user.
Step 5:-
When you are at this step, you will get install shields displaying all the setting you have made. If you are ok with it, you can click finish, this will instal the 1000V on your ESX host.
Now, you are ready to configure Cisco Nexus 1000V for Switching traffic between Vmware machines and also you can monitor traffic between Vmwares and other network traffic from VMmachines using NetFlow export from Cisco Nexus 1000V. We will discuss more on NetFlow export from Cisco Nexus 1000V in our next blog.
Regards
Praveen Kumar V
NetFlow Analyzer Technical Team
