The Cisco Nexus 9000v is a virtual platform family that is designed to simulate control plane aspects of a standalone switch running Cisco Nexus 9000 software. This platform family uses the same software image that runs the Cisco Nexus 9000 hardware platforms. Although the virtual platforms don’t attempt to simulate any specific ASICs or hardware SKUs, they are aligned with their hardware counterparts. An optimized Cisco software data plane handles the traffic across the line card interfaces. The Cisco Nexus 9000v virtual platform family consists of two virtual platforms: Nexus 9300v and Nexus 9500v. The following sections describe the capabilities of these two platforms.
The virtual platforms in the Nexus 9000v platform family allows you to simulate their network in a cost-effective manner. Use the simulated network to validate configurations prior to their application on a production network. Use these platforms to rapidly develop and test network automation tools using Cisco NX-OS programmability interfaces.