Cisco Nexus switches

VMware KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2149722 https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/31/vmware_to_end_support_for_thirdparty_virtual_switches/ Besides offering the NX-OS interface to configure, manage and monitor the virtual switch it also supports LACP link aggregation where the standard virtual switches only support static LAGs[4] The configuration of VEMs is done via the VSM NX-OS Command-line interface.

A Nexus 1100 can host up to 14 VSMs and it also allows additional services such as a Network Analysis Module to be run.

For the HP BladeSystem C3000 and C7000 server blade chassis, the Cisco Nexus B22HP fabric extender exists.

(October 2011)[6] The Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX400 and BX900 blade server chassis uses the B22F fabric extender.

The switch is capable of building a route-table with up to 16000 prefixes, 8000 host-entries and 4000 multicast routes and up to 4096 VLANs are supported.

The 3064 has a single fan tray, two replaceable power-supplies on board and two separate out of band management interfaces.

To connect the 3064 to the rest of the network the use of proprietary EtherChannel or Link aggregation using industry-standard LACP or IEEE 802.3ad is supported with up to 32 port-channels with each up to 16 physical interfaces.

And this blade-switch also has a serial console cable for direct access to the CLI[13] At present only switches for the IBM blade systems are available.

[18] They can be used as layer2 and layer3 switches and can aggregate traffic from the Fabric Extenders (FEX) for different blade-server systems.

Both models support either front to back or back to front airflow and they do support Fibre Channel over Ethernet in combination with a 'full' FCoE switch (e.g. Nexus 5500 or Brocade 8000 switch (which is same as Dell PowerConnect 8000e or blade version PCM 8428-k)).

It can operate as both layer2 and as layer3 switch and in combination with FEX (fabric extenders) you can aggregate up to 1152 ports at 1 Gbit/s or 10 Gbit/s.

The 2nd model in the Nexus 6000 series is a modular chassis, 4 Rack units high.

However, these switches mostly shared common hardware components, ASICs, and the same software images, so recently the Cisco decided to merge the product portfolios.

The 9000 series provides converged Active Directory (AD), Network Standard Execution, (NSX) and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) using Software Defined Networking (SDN) in a modified Nexus operating system (Nexus OS ACI).