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Cisco Nexus 1000V Plugin

Cisco Nexus 1000V for KVM and OpenStack

The Cisco Nexus 1000V is a distributed virtual switch for the KVM hypervisor, consisting of two main components:

• Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM)—A software component that is deployed on each KVM host. Each VM on the host is connected to the VEM through virtual Ethernet (vEth) ports.
• Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM)—The Management component that controls multiple VEMs and helps in the definition of VM-focused network policies. It is deployed either as a virtual appliance on any KVM host or on the Cisco Cloud Services Platform appliance.

Each of these components is tightly integrated with the OpenStack environment:

• The VEM is a hypervisor-resident component and is tightly integrated with the KVM architecture
• The VSM is integrated with OpenStack using the OpenStack Neutron Plug-in.
• The Neutron ML2 plugin for N1Kv translates OpenStack operations from the CLI and Horizon dashboard to corresponding operations on the VSM/VEM.
• The OpenStack Neutron API has been extended to include two additional user-defined resources:
◦Network profiles as logical groupings of network segments.
◦Policy profiles group port policy information, including security

Using OpenStack, you create VMs, networks, and subnets on the Cisco Nexus 1000V for KVM, by defining components such as the following:
• Tenants
• Network segments, such as VLANs, VLAN trunks, and VXLANs
• IP address pools (subnets)

Using the Cisco Nexus 1000V for KVM VSM, you create port profiles (called policy profiles in OpenStack), which define the port policy information, including security settings. When a VM is deployed, a port profile is dynamically created on the Cisco Nexus 1000V for KVM for each unique combination of policy port profile and network segment. All other VMs deployed with the same policy to this network reuse this dynamic port profile.

Category

Networking

Red Hat Certifications

This product has been certified to run on the following Red Hat products and technologies:

Target Product Level
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 7.x Certified