VMware and Cisco have teamed up to ease the process of virtual server configuration.

The product, called Cisco Nexus 1000V, will allow network administrators to deploy a single setting across all of a datacentre's virtual servers.

VMware chief technology officer Stephen Herrod explained the logic behind the new system during his keynote to 14,000 attendees at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

Normally server virtualisation has a long deployment time because of the large amount of coordination needed among server, network, storage and security administrators, he explained.

"It is a long process with administrators needing to configure each switch the same," he said. "Now we are moving to datacentre-wide network settings, so there is only one set of administrative tasks."

Cisco's virtual network switch solves "a number of real issues for virtual server deployment", a spokesman from BT Services told vnunet.com.

"It is normally a really grey area from a process perspective and you need different people to manage the network equipment and different people to manage the server equipment," he said.

"The new offering will make network changes and the deployment of virtual servers a lot easier."

Butler Group analyst Roy Illsley added: "Now that Cisco has moved into the datacentre a lot more, the question is where does the network end and the datacentre start?"

Cisco Nexus 1000V is in beta and is expected to be widely available by the first half of 2009.