The Cisco Nexus 1000V is a Cisco Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) switch rendered fully in software for multi-tenant services composed of both physical and virtual networking resources. This distributed virtual switch allows a network team to monitor, manage and troubleshoot both the physical and virtual networks with the same Cisco commands and tools.
Nexus 1000V, which is is based on IEEE 802.1Q switching technology, is programmable. It uses a control path application-programming interface (API) in order to communicate with the data plane. Nexus 1000v can be used with any physical switch, regardless of the manufacturer. This allows administrators who uses non-Cisco physical network components to take advantage of the 1000v to handle virtual network management.