VMware Networking Blog

Just on a week ago, Cisco released the Nexus 1000V R1.2 virtual switch for vSphere 4. This introduced a bunch of new features mainly around setup/installation and security. The full list of new features are as follows:

• GUI setup following software install
• Layer 3 control between VSM and VEMs
• Virtual Service Domains for classifying and separating traffic for network services
• iSCSI Multipath—supporting multipath feature introduced in vSphere 4
• XML API for developing client apps for managing/monitoring the Nexus 1000V
• DHCP Snooping for validating DHCP messages and filtering invalid responses
• Dynamic ARP Inspection for validating ARP requests and responses
• IP Source Guard for filtering traffic on interfaces to valid MAC and IP addresses 
• MAC Pinning for assigning Ethernet port members to particular port channel subgroup (where upstream switches do not support port channels)
• Static Pinning

This is quite a list of new features for a dot release. I know of a couple of customers who will warmly welcome the new L3 control feature.

You can find a write up of these features in the Cisco Nexus 1000V Release Notes.  You can find the compatibility information here.

We have also updated the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch and Nexus 1000V feature matrix. It is posted here on the Cisco website and will be available at the vmware.com/go/networking site in the next few days.