The joint venture between Cisco and VMware brought a new
highly scalable product for networkers is Cisco Nexsus 1000V. Cisco Nexus 1000V is a distributed virtual switch
which is fully integrated within VMware Infrastructure.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V has 2 different modules, they are ;

Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM):-

Each hypervisor contains one VEM module and it is a software
solution that effectively performs following tasks:

1. Advance
   Networking
2. Security
3. Traffic
   switching between virtual machines
4. Routing
   between rest of the network

Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) :-

The VSM is a standalone, physical or virtual module that
performs the following functions for the Cisco Nexus 1000V system:

1. Configuration
2. Management
3. Monitoring
4. Integration
   with VMware

In the Cisco Nexus 1000V, traffic is switched between
virtual machines locally at each VEM instance level. VEM also connects the
local virtual machine with the rest of the network through the upstream network
switch.

So, with this background on the architecture of Cisco Nexsus
1000 V, the next step is deploying this as virtual switch on your ESX host.
This blog is about step by step installation of Cisco 1000V on on the ESX host.

Pre-requisites:

Download the Cisco Nexsus 1000 V by clicking here(Link). This will be a Zip
file with the following name