The Cisco switching module enables you to consolidate SAN deployments with fewer hardware components. You can consolidate workloads from hundreds of virtual machines with high performance, and scale with incremental updates as your SAN grows - all while protecting your existing investment. The Cisco switching module also provides Cisco VMpath technology that enables advanced virtual machine-aware SAN provisioning and monitoring for virtualized data centers. With Cisco VMpath, you can monitor, manage, and control SAN resource allocation and performance on a per-virtual machine basis, and map paths all the way from the server to storage enabling end-to-end tracking of mission-critical workloads. The Cisco switching module is hot swappable and supports hot-swappable Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) transceivers.