Cisco Nexus 1000V installation question

[Michael McNamara]

I'm looking at the installation of the Cisco Nexus 1000V and just realized that the VSM must be installed on a VM?

Is that correct? I had assumed (I guess incorrectly) that the VSM could be installed on a bare metal server with the appropriate hardware (memory, disk, CPU, etc). Now I'm guessing that I'm wrong but I've not been able to find any real reference that says the VSM must be installed within a VM, it can not be installed a bare metal server.

Thanks for the help!

[Michael McNamara]

It looks like you need to run the Nexus 1000V VSM as a guest VM although it appears that Cisco has released the Nexus 1010 which combines the hardware and software and removes the need to host the VSM on an ESX host.

I decided to stand up two VSM on standalone ESX servers outside of my HP BladeSystem enclosures. Only time will tell if this was the right move to make but so far things are looking really good.

Cheers!