Virtualization technologies have brought with them the promise of increased security and energy saving. Such was the case with the Cisco Nexus virtual switching environment. However, possible security issues of this environment have not been evaluated and the achievable energy savings have not been quantified yet. In particular, it was necessary to investigate whether the security vulnerabilities existing in physical switches had persisted into the virtual environment. This paper provides an evaluation of the energy saving and an analysis of the security implications of the Cisco Nexus virtual distributed switching environment.

Peer Reviewed