Cisco Cisco Nexus 1010 Virtual Services Appliance Merkblatt
Q&A
© 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Cisco Nexus 1010 and 1010-X Virtual Services
Appliances
Appliances
Q. Why should I use the Cisco Nexus
®
1010 and 1010-X Virtual Services Appliances (VSAs)?
A. The Cisco
®
Nexus 1010 and Cisco Nexus1010-X VSAs are appliances that can provide improved
management and scalability in Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switches and VMware vSphere deployments.
The Cisco Nexus 1000V Series can be deployed exclusively as software running in a VMware ESX or ESXi
cluster; however, the Cisco Nexus 1010 and 1010-X VSAs provide customers with an additional deployment
option with several benefits. The VSAs are used to manage and host the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Virtual
Supervisor Modules (VSMs) that control the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Virtual Ethernet Modules (VEMs),
which reside in the hypervisor of the host server. Also, the Cisco Nexus 1010 and 1010-X can host a variety of
virtual network services, including the Cisco Prime
™
Network Analysis Module (NAM) for Nexus 1010, Cisco
Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) for Nexus 1000V Series Switch, and Cisco Data Center Network Manager
(DCNM).
●
The Cisco Nexus 1010 and 1010-X VSAs act like terminal servers for the networking team, providing
consoles for any of the available VSM instances residing on the VSAs. This capability is accessed through
the command-line interface (CLI) and does not require the use of VMware vCenter as a console for the
VSM instance.
●
Placing the management and control path elements, such as the VSM, on a Cisco Nexus 1010 or 1010-X
allows you to manage policies separately from VMware vCenter administrators, helping you meet
compliance and audit requirements and also reducing administrative errors. Offloading the VSM to a
dedicated appliance delivers scalability and performance improvements to the virtualized data center
infrastructure. Eliminating the dependency on VMware vCenter means that networking services no longer
depend on host servers being up and running, which can be helpful during scenarios such as data center
restarts.
●
A virtual services platform close to, but not resident within, the virtualization infrastructure permits a virtual
machine-aware solution such as Cisco Prime NAM to gain accurate network statistics directly from data
sources, including virtual ports within the hypervisor.
Q. How are the Cisco Nexus 1010 and 1010-X deployed?
A. Based on the Cisco Unified Computing System
™
(Cisco UCS
™
) C200 M2 High-Density Rack-Mount Server
and running Cisco NX-OS Software, the Cisco Nexus 1010 and 1010-X use a modular service blade
architecture to host multiple VSMs and other virtual network services such as Cisco VSG, Cisco Prime NAM,
and Cisco DCNM. When deployed in pairs, the appliances improve system availability by automatically
supporting active-standby configuration of the VSMs.
Q. What other services can be hosted on the Cisco Nexus 1010 and 1010-X? And how many?
A. The Cisco Nexus 1010 and 1010-X can host virtual networking services called virtual service blades (VSBs).
As of Cisco NX-OS Release 4.2(1)SP1(3), up to six VSBs are supported on the 1010 or 1010-X. Cisco NX-OS
Release 4.2(1)SP1(4) will support up to 10 VSBs on the Nexus 1010-X platform. The following VSBs are
supported today: