As promised, here's the big news hot off the pressroom floor. Cisco and VMware announced at VMWorld 2008, in Las Vegas that they are entering into a partnership that highlights three main areas:

** The Cisco Nexus 1000V Product will be available as an add-on module for VMware ESX.

** Cisco WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) is now available for VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

** Collaborative Professional Services

This partnership fully engages Cisco into the areas of Desktop and Server virtualization from an Operating System perspective. The Cisco Nexus product, if purchased as an add-on module, will replace VMware's native Virtual Switch offering.

The most important part of this announcement is the VDI performance boost from Cisco's WAAS. WAAS improves and optimizes WAN protocol speeds up to 65% over that of RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

The two companies are also combining forces in the Professional Services (consulting) area to deliver fully virtualized network infrastructures to customers.