HP announced some nice new HP Networking products which makes the FlexFabric portfolio even more impressive…
In my opinion the one that could become a big hit is the HP FlexFabric Virtual Switch 5900v.
This switch is the virtual version of the more and more used Comware based 5900AF physical switch.
This virtual switch has nearly all the features of its physical brother and enables these features now inside the virtual world between the VM’s. So more advanced capabilities than the, to mention a name, VMware virtual and distributed switches…
Also important is that this switch will be managed exactly the same way as the physical version with the HP IMC tool… How easy can it be…
The 5900v virtual switch extends the features of the 5900AF physical top-of-rack switch into a VMware ESXi hypervisor using Ethernet virtual bridging (EVB), which adheres to the virtual Ethernet port aggregate (VEPA) portion of the 802.1Qbg Ethernet standard.
That is a complicated way of saying that by supporting these standards, the network profiles of a particular VM on a given server linked to a certain switch are kept synchronized with that VM even as it flits around a cluster of machines thanks to live migration.
Currently HP only supports VMware as hypervisor platform, but the product manager announced at HP Discover that other popular platforms like Hyper-V, Xen and Red Hat KVM will be supported also in the near future…
More information on the switch can be found here: http://h17007.www1.hp.com/docs/interop/2013/4AA4-6494ENW.pdf