VN-Link Evolution Chapter 3
Swordfish Beta 1 Delivered – July 2008
Before this program, I never realized how much work is involved in getting customers to actually test and provide feedback on a new product, especially a software add-on to another company’s product. Swordfish’s success was dependent on a successful beta cycle of VMware’s next generation product in the 2nd half of 2008 and 1st part of 2009 (to be known as vSphere) and customer’s desire to evaluate the new features. To make matters even more difficult, because of customer confidentiality agreements already in place, the 2 companies could not share beta customer information. Since the Swordfish beta was to be run as a “add-on” beta program to the vSphere beta, we (Cisco) needed to approach customers one by one who we knew were interested in Swordfish and possibly participating in the vSphere beta program already. Sometimes we got lucky, sometimes we struck out, but overall, this “beta on a beta” proved to be very difficult from a logistics perspective. Looking forward, my goal would be to find a way to run subsequent beta programs on a version of vSphere that has already GA’d to dramatically simplify the customer engagement process. This wasn’t an option with Virtual Infrastructure 3 because of the lack of the vNetwork Distributed Switch functionality (which was known at the time as “distributed virtual switch”).
In parallel to figuring out the beta process with VMware, the team was busy with nailing down the the business arrangement to ensure that 1) both Cisco and VMware could embrace this co-development effort as a win-win (not very easy when you have two 800lbs gorillas sitting in the same room, neither wanting to move away or give on the terms they normally require in any agreement) and 2) the solution would result in something easily deployed and adopted by our mutual customers. Flexibility, lots of hard work, many late nights and some ingenious engineering efforts on both sides went into pulling this off, and it was certainly aided (from my perspective) by the initial feedback we were starting to get from joint customers.
So what was the initial feedback from customers? It was extremely positive. There were only a few features supported in the beta 1 program, but one of the key innovations that the Swordfish engineering team had developed (a feature called Port Profiles) was starting to catch on with customers. This feature allows network administrators to configure/set network policy for virtual machine environments and then expose a collection of these network policies to the server administrator through VMware’s vCenter tool. Port Profiles would enable network, security and server admins to embrace server virtualization like never before, allowing the functional data center teams to respect each other’s configuration and operational boundaries. This is a critical capability if customers are going to attempt to virtualize 100% of their applications in the next few years.
As the positive customer feedback continued to come in, we worked with VMware to figure out if we wanted to introduce this new concept at the upcoming VMWorld show in Las Vegas in September of 2008. The goal was to create awareness for the new technology and pave the way for an even broader phase 2 beta program (the biggest in Cisco’s history) and successful product launch. The 2 companies agreed that this would be a great step to take and the planning began for a September technology launch.
The next chapter
Chapter 4: August 2008 – Swordfish officially named the Nexus 1000V
