Cisco is collaborating with Microsoft to bring its virtual switch to Hyper-V next year when Windows Server 8 is released. While Cisco’s Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch already supports VMware software, Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 does not get the same love. The new support for Hyper-V will only apply to the forthcoming Windows Server 8, which introduces greater ability to integrate third-party modules than its predecessor, according to Cisco.

Today, Hyper-V customers can use a virtual switch included with Microsoft’s hypervisor, and connect to Cisco physical switches and other Cisco products like the Unified Computing System. The new step of bringing Cisco virtual switch software to the hypervisor layer, however, will achieve greater visibility into virtual machines and better provisioning and management capabilities, Cisco says.

“Cisco’s policy enforcement, automated provisioning and diagnostics features are available through Cisco Nexus 1000V, and will help IT administrators rapidly deploy virtual workloads in Windows Server Hyper-V environments and scale to very large data centers,” Cisco said in an announcement today.

Cisco is also adapting its Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology to support Hyper-V in Windows Server 8, providing IT administrators the same type of management interface and capabilities for both physical and virtual networking.

“By collapsing the physical and virtual networking layers into one virtual infrastructure, VM-FEX reduces the number of management points that the network administrator has to monitor, and offers the same consistent feature-set for both virtual and physical infrastructures,” Cisco said. “This also improves traffic engineering, visibility and troubleshooting capability for VM traffic, so IT administrators can architect a holistic virtual and physical network infrastructure.”

Expanding the ability of Cisco networking tools to work with Hyper-V could help Microsoft make its case that its server virtualization software is a viable alternative to VMware. The analyst firm Gartner has praised the Hyper-V technology and said Microsoft has the advantage of providing management tools that are familiar to Windows administrations, but that it has struggled to convert large enterprise customers from VMware to Hyper-V.

Cisco has had a stronger virtualization partnership with VMware, supporting vSphere with both the VM-FEX and Nexus 1000V. VM-FEX, in fact, works with both VMware and Red Hat’s KVM hypervisor.

Instead of shoehorning the capabilities into Windows Server 2008 R2, Cisco and Microsoft are focusing on next year’s Windows Server 8 release. It wouldn’t be physically impossible to bring these tools into the current version of Windows Server, but it will be easier to do so in Windows Server 8, says Cisco director of product marketing Prashant Gandhi. Besides Windows Server 8 allowing greater integration with third-party tools, Cisco and Microsoft will be able to work together closely and troubleshoot problems as they arise. With a currently shipping product like Windows Server 2008, “it’s hard to go back and look for new integration points,” Gandhi said.