John Chambers with Cisco discusses Cisco’s vision of Unified Computing that bridges business and IT.  A large component of this vision is virtualization. VMware is a key partner in this. According to the Cisco web site:

Specific areas of joint development, technical integration and service/support for the Cisco Unified Computing System architecture include the following:

• Support for the Unified Fabric with certification of consolidated I/O via 10Gb lossless Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
• Built in VN-Link, a new protocol jointly proposed by Cisco and VMWare to the IEEE as an industry standards-based approach for providing granular network visibility at the virtual machine level
• Pass-through virtual switching with CPU offload; including built-in architectural support to implement VMware?s VMDirectPath technology when it becomes available
• Integrated vCenter management for virtual network policies and resources
• Joint virtualization consulting services to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions across their data center that reduce costs by provisioning new applications quickly and safely while maintaining high levels of application performance

The joint efforts of Cisco and VMware enable customers the ability to delivery uncompromising control with greater efficiency while preserving choice within the data center.