Just stumbled across this unbelievable fact in the Nexus 1000V release notes:

IPV6 ACL rules are not supported.

My first reaction: “You must be kidding, right? Are we still in 20th century?” ... and then it dawned on me: Nexus 1000V is using the NX-OS control plane and it’s still stuck in 4.0 release which did not support IPv6 ACLs (IPv6 support was added to NX-OS in release 4.1(2)).

I simply had to check when the 4.1(2) software was released for the Nexus 7000: according to Cisco’s software download tool the release date for the n7000-s1-dk9.4.1.2.bin image is December 18th 2008.

So let’s see if I can get this straight: every vendor is telling us that scalable data centers and cloud computing are two of the hottest networking trends at the moment. VMware has launched vCloud a few months ago ... and Cisco is selling us software with two years old feature set as the best switching software for the VMware hypervisor. There’s something wrong with this picture.

Don't get me wrong – I still think Nexus 1000V is a good idea, it’s just the lack of focus that’s making it obsolete.

And just in case you’re wondering how Nexus 1000V would fit into your virtualized data center – why don’t you watch my Data Center 3.0 for Networking Engineers webinar (buy a recording or yearly subscription)?