Cisco has announced the integration of Cisco VFrame Data Centre with VMware Virtual Infrastructure, a key solution for the Cisco vision of next generation data centres, called Data Centre 3.0. The solutions and services that support Cisco Data Centre 3.0 are designed to help customers better utilise their data centre resources, deploy more robust business continuance, and enhance data security.

Cisco's integration with VMware Infrastructure 3 claims to offer customers enhanced IT automation capabilities, including added VMware ESX Server capacity on demand, as well as orchestrated configuration of network services.

"Cisco and VMware share a joint vision for driving and supporting a service-oriented approach for the data centre," said Krish Ramakrishnan, vice president and general manager, Server Virtualisation Business Unit, Cisco. "Together our efforts support the IT collaboration that will be required across organisations to streamline operations and take advantage of the data centre technology advancements to come."

Through the joint integration efforts, VFrame Data Centre loads VMware ESX Server onto bare-metal computer hardware, configures the physical server I/O to utilise Cisco data centre switches, and offers a two way policy API with VMware VirtualCentre to coordinate the configuration.