Abstract

Modern enterprises require infrastructure that can adapt as application platforms, virtualization strategies, and business requirements evolve. Organizations need the flexibility to support traditional and cloud-native workloads, multiple virtualization environments, and diverse storage protocols without introducing unnecessary infrastructure silos, operational complexity, or barriers to workload mobility.

Cisco and NetApp commissioned Tolly to evaluate FlexPod, a jointly engineered and validated converged infrastructure solution integrating NetApp storage with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco Nexus One. Tolly evaluated FlexPod demonstrating simultaneous support for VMware vSphere, Red Hat OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V, workload migration from VMware to OpenShift and Hyper-V using the NetApp Shift Toolkit, and multiprotocol storage connectivity using NFS, FCP, NVMe/TCP, and iSCSI.

Testing demonstrated that FlexPod simultaneously supported VMware vSphere, Red Hat OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Tolly successfully migrated Rocky Linux workloads from VMware to both OpenShift and Hyper-V using the NetApp Shift Toolkit. Testing also demonstrated multiprotocol storage connectivity using MDS/FCP, Nexus9K-NVMe/TCP, and iSCSI across the virtualized environments, illustrating the flexibility of the integrated Cisco and NetApp infrastructure.