Cisco Cisco Nexus 5010 Switch Manuale Tecnico

VM-FEX combines virtual and physical networking into a single infrastructure. It allows you to provision,
configure, and manage virtual machine network traffic and bare metal network traffic within a unified
infrastructure.

The VM-FEX software extends the Cisco fabric extender technology to the virtual machine with these
capabilities:

Each virtual machine includes a dedicated interface on the parent switch.

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All virtual machine traffic is sent directly to the dedicated interface on the switch.

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The standard vSwitch in the hypervisor is eliminated.

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VM-FEX is one type of Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS or VDS). The DVS presents an abstraction of a
single switch across multiple ESX servers that are part of the same Datacenter container in vCenter. The
Virtual Machine (VM) Virtual Network Interface Controller (VNIC) configuration is maintained from a
centralized location (Nexus 5000 or UCS in VM-FEX, this document illustrates the Nexus 5000-based
VM-FEX).

VM-FEX can operate in two modes:

Pass-through: This is the default mode, in which the VEM is involved in the data path for the VM
traffic.

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High-performance: VM traffic is not handled by the VEM but is passed directly to the Network IO
Virtualization (NIV) adapter.

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In order to use the high-performance mode, it should be requested by the port-profile configuration and should
be supported by the VM Operating System and by its virtual adapter. More information about this is provided
later in this document.