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VMWare introduced vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) in vSphere 4, a federated network switching platform that resides virtually across multiple VMWare vSphere servers. vDS simplified virtual networking with a distributed and cumulative model where virtual switches span across multiple ESX/ESXi 4 hosts are aggregated. vDS later introduced support with third party virtual switch like Cisco Nexus 1000v Series, which provides the same functionality as vDS but of course, with enhanced features by leveraging vSphere 4, like:-

·         Host Profiles

·         vShield Zones

·         iSCSI Multipathing

·         AppSpeed

·         Site Recovery Manager 4.0

Here is the one more good news. Cisco will offer Nexus 1000v series support with Windows Server 8 Hyper-V sometime next year. Cisco’s Virtual Supervisor Module will be used to manage distributed virtual switch which is tightly integrated with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. The Virtual Supervisor Module can be deployed on a virtual machine or on a physical appliance. The entire virtual distributed switch can be hosted on Cisco physical appliance called Nexus 1010 Virtual Service Appliance.

Cisco Nexus 1000V series Switches consists of two components:-

1.       Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM) is a software line card that is embedded in Hyper-V deployed on each host. Each virtual machine deployed on Hyper-V is connected to the VEM through a virtual Ethernet (vEth) port.

2.       Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) is a management module to control VEMs and define virtual machine network policies.

As you can see above, VEM is embedded in Hyper-V and Cisco VSM for managing multiple VEMs through a single console.