VN-Link Evolution Chapter 2
Swordfish Starts Swimming – January 2008
In January of 2008, the Swordfish engineering team delivered the first NX-OS based proof of concept for what would ship as the Nexus 1000V for VMware’s vSphere 4.0 almost 1.5 years later. This proof of concept, named “Sailfish”, leveraged the same OS that was being used to run the new Nexus 7000 Data Center Switch, known as NX-OS. NX-OS (Nexus Operating System) is a data-center-class operating system that combined the best of Cisco’s IOS and SANOS with a data center focused feature set to meet the demands of the virtualized data center.
Sailfish, from an architectural perspective, leveraged NX-OS to provide a Cisco CLI for the existing VMware ESX 3.5 vSwitch. This basically allowed the operator to use the familiar Cisco IOS interface to configure and provision the VMware vSwitch. A key feature of this Sailfish was the ability for a single Cisco NX-OS instance to manage many vSwitches across separate ESX 3.5 hosts, a feature that would be delivered more than a year later in vSphere 4.0 known as the vNetwork Distributed Switch.
For the next 3 months, we used Sailfish as a demonstration with key customers around the world to validate that what we were doing with Swordfish was something that they would actually deploy if a product was ever actually built. The feedback was largely positive, but also a little mixed.
Our original assumption was that customers would be attracted to this type of product because Cisco could provide more features (QoS, ACLs, NetFlow, ERSPAN, etc) than the basic vSwitch and we found this to be accurate. What we also found was that customers were looking for more operational tools (management, monitoring, diagnostics etc) as the virtual access layer was continuing to grow both in size and in complexity as the percentage of virtualized workloads continued to grow.
With overwhelming positive response from our proof of concept vehicle, it was time to get back to work on delivering the first beta of the final product to support VMware’s next major release.
The next chapter…
Chapter 3: July 2008 – Swordfish Beta 1 Delivered
