Will Cisco be developing Virtual Machine instead of appliances?

[martin.foote]

Hello

I wasn't really sure where to ask the question so I ended up in CSC ideas.

It seems there are a variety of traditional network appliances being offered as virtual machines, wan optimisation being a prime example being pushed by other suppliers also routers, firewalls and load balancers are on offer from various people. These are often open source so don't cost anything but I would imagine, and have read, they don't have the same robustness as Cisco.. My questions for discussion are:

• Does anyone know if Cisco has development of virtual machines in the road map for WAAS, or other products?
• What do others think about running the traditional appliances on VM's, not looking for other vendor suggestions but I've got little experience of them - think I'd have to be convinced of their stability!?

Cheers

Martin

[Rick1776]

Good question.

First Cisco does have a virtual addition of WAAS call vWAAS that can run on a UCS-E Blade on a router.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/routers/virtual-wide-area-application-services-vwaas/index.html
This however was never a great solution and Cisco will be moving away from this approach and purchased a company called Viptela that has a way better WAAS solution that will be able to run on a appliance or virtual version on routers.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise-networks/sd-wan/index.html#~stickynav=5

From my understanding this might not even require a UCS-E blade but can be run directly on Memory and use dedicated cores on the ISR 4K series routers. Pretty cool stuff.

Here are some other links as well.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUnvcD6xXOc6rIb7MgR79RA

https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-76328