Our Commitment to Innovation, Choice, and Openness in Next Generation Virtual Switching – Part 2

As many of you may have read on Monday in Tom Edsall’s blog post, Cisco announced our intent to put Cisco ACI into the public cloud – AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google. This allows our customers to place policy anywhere.  And now, with ACI Virtual Edge (AVE), we will continue to fulfill our ‘ACI Anywhere’ promise.

As outlined in my blog post in May, we at Cisco are committed to innovation, choice, and openness for customers in the wake of VMware’s decision to cease support for the third party virtual switch APIs in vSphere 6.5U2 and beyond.

I’m excited to announce that we are following through on our commitment. We will soon begin Early Field Trials (EFT) of the ACI Virtual Edge (AVE), our next generation of the Application Virtual Switch (AVS) for ACI environments. We are on schedule to ship by the end of this year. The ACI Virtual Edge is hypervisor independent, offering consistent policy control across multiple hypervisors, with our initial version targeted for VMware ESXi.

Cisco understands the burden of operational change. We have designed the ACI Virtual Edge for an easy transition with minimal operational disruption. Current customers can continue to use the AVS and move to the AVE at their convenience. We will continue support for the AVS to alleviate customer concern. With this solution, customers can maintain their existing policies and operational procedures.

Stay tuned as we will continue to reveal more in the coming weeks. If you are attending VMworld, please seek out the Cisco team or prearrange a meeting through your account team. We’ll be happy to reveal more and show you a live demo.