IT organizations have traditionally designed and built virtualized infrastructures by selecting best of breed components and piecing them together. What's great about the build your own strategy is it's incredibly flexible. The challenge is it's not that easy. It's just not simple. It takes time, requires people and expertise that you may or may not have, and represents risk should any of the steps not go according to plan. 

Hence, an increasing amount of IT organizations prefer deploying integrated infrastructure solutions due to the time it
saves in planning and integration. What Cisco and EMC have done is dramatically reduce the complexity inherent to building your own virtualized infrastructure by releasing several new Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX.  These validated solutions can enable IT to reduce planning, build, and test time, resulting in cost reduction and freed up resources. These solutions are architected with Cisco's server (Cisco UCS) and networking technology, EMC's unified storage and backup technology along with the customer's choice of hypervisor.

Cisco and EMC have worked hand-in-hand not only to ensure VSPEX is rigorously tested, proven and validated by EMC but is also rigorously tested, proven and validated by Cisco.

We have recently released several new Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) for desktop virtualization as well as VMware and Microsoft virtualized infrastructure solutions. The new designs can be found here.

We also have corresponding solution briefs for each CVD that provide a high level overview of each solution and required components. Below is a table from the solution brief which highlights the component choices for the VMware infrastructure solutions based on 100, 125 and 250 virtual machines.

These new Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX are just another example of how EMC and Cisco continue to collaborate and offer industry-leading virtual infrastructure solutions that can simplify deployment and improve efficiency. As always, the goal is to enable IT infrastructure to quickly and efficiently respond to the needs of the business.

To learn more about Cisco's solutions for EMC VSPEX please visit www.cisco.com/go/vspex.