Cisco Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module 5.1 for Nexus 1010 Data Sheet

 

 

Data Sheet 

© 2010-2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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Cisco Nexus 1000V Network Analysis Module Virtual Service 
Blade 4.2.1N 

As mission-critical workloads migrate to virtual servers, visibility into the virtual switching infrastructure 

becomes critical to manage end-to-end service delivery. The virtual switching layer extends the network 

to the virtual servers. Lack of insight into this layer affects the ability of network administrators to manage 

application services. In addition, the fluidity of the virtual infrastructure, in terms of workload-driven 

dynamic resource allocation or virtual server migrations across hosts, poses a new set of management 

challenges. In this dynamic environment, network administrators are not only responsible for 

troubleshooting application performance issues but also for making sure that the network is ready to 

support resource scaling in real time. This demands deeper network visibility and analytics to present 

meaningful and consistent performance information for network administrators. 

Cisco Nexus 1000V Network Analysis Module (NAM) Virtual Service Blade (VSB) allows network administrators to 

extend operational visibility into Cisco Nexus 1000V Switch deployments (Figure 1). The Cisco Nexus 1000V Switch 

is a software switch on a server that delivers Cisco Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) services to virtual machines (VMs) 

hosted on that server. This distributed switch has two major components: the Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM) and the 

Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM), which manages the VEMs. A VSM can itself be deployed as a virtual machine; as 

an alternate deployment scenario, the 

 can host four Virtual Supervisor 

Modules. 

Integrated with the Cisco Nexus 1010 appliance, the Cisco NAM VSB offers combined network and application 

performance visibility essential to address service delivery challenges in next-generation data centers. The Cisco 

NAM VSB allows you to effectively use embedded management features, such as Encapsulated Remote Switched 

Port Analyzer (ERSPAN) and NetFlow, on the Cisco Nexus 1000V Switch to: 

● 

Analyze network usage behavior by application, host/VM, and conversation to identify bottlenecks that may 

affect performance and availability 

● 

Troubleshoot performance issues with extended visibility into VM-to-VM traffic, virtual interface statistics, and 

transaction response times 

● 

Assess impact on network behavior due to changes such as VM migration, new application deployment, and 

port profile update 

● 

Improve the efficiency of your virtual infrastructure and distributed application components with 

comprehensive traffic analysis 

As a distinctive advantage, Cisco NAM allows you to monitor the network and virtual machines uninterrupted by 

VMotion operations.