Cisco Nexus switches
modular and fixed port network switches designed for the data center
The Cisco Nexus series switches are modular and fixed port network switches designed for the data center. Cisco Systems introduced the Nexus Series of switches on January 28, 2008. The first chassis in the Nexus 7000 family is a 10-slot chassis with two supervisor engine slots and eight I/O module slots at the front, as well as five crossbar switch fabric modules at the rear. Beside the Nexus 7000 there are also other models in the Nexus range.
All switches in the Nexus range run the modular NX-OS firmware/operating system on the fabric. NX-OS has some high-availability features compared to the well-known Cisco IOS. This platform is optimized for high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
The Nexus switching range
Cisco Nexus OS Software Defined Networking (SDN) allows the same policies that govern Identity and Access Management (IAM) to dictate levels of access to applications and data through a totally converged infrastructure not possible with legacy network and system access methods.
The Nexus 9000 is the high-end model in the Nexus range of datacenter switches. Other models are:
Nexus 1000v virtual switch
Nexus 2000 fabric extender
Nexus 3000 series
Nexus 4001 IBM Blade Center switch
Nexus 5000 series
Nexus 6000 series
Nexus 7000 series modular datacenter switches
Nexus 9000 series
Nexus 1000v
The 1000v is a virtual switch for use in virtual environments including both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V It is as such not a physical box but a software application that interacts with the hypervisor so you can virtualize the networking environment and be able to configure your system as if all virtual servers have connections to a physical switch and include the capabilities that a switch offers such as multiple VLANs per virtual interface, layer-3 options, security features etc. Per infrastructure/cluster you have one VM running the Nexus 1000v as virtual appliance, this is the VSM or Virtual Supervisor Module and then on each node you would have a client or Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM) a vSwitch which replaces the standard vSwitch.
The public source identifies “Cisco Nexus switches” as modular and fixed port network switches designed for the data center. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cisco, Nexus and switches.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cisco Nexus switches” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.