Toys for the next mainstream

Well I have completed the first week of my new job. Looks like there is some really interesting stuff to work on which is great.

Took delivery of some nice networking hardware this week for use at a show. Its a Cisco Nexus 5000 with some sweet Converged Network Adapter (CNA) cards.

What makes this so cool for a VMware geek is that you are looking at where the industry will be in 12 to 18 months time. Currently the networking fabrics in a virtual environment could do with some improvement. We can work with what we have but the VMware admins should not really be the network admin. The network admins don't like the VMware hosts because they all just look like trunk ports to switches, all their usual tools for configuration, monitoring, security and trouble shooting just don't work. An the data center or server admins love the fact that they can save power and space in their data center through consolidation yet they are getting bigger hosts with lots of IO addaptors to support different fabrics.

What is going to make all this look different over the coming year. With the Distribute Virtual Switch (DVS) in VMware 4 combined with Nexus hardware in the data center (such as this Nexus 5000) hooked into Nexus 1000V virtual switch in VMware all running over some nice 10G unified fabric ports we are going to see serious realigment in the big end of town.

Exciting times. Lets hope with the crash of all the financial markets people will have enough money to purchase all of this sweet gear!