Cisco Continues to Support Application Virtual Switch for Application Centric Infrastructure in vSphere Deployments

Cisco Application Virtual Switch (AVS), a virtual member of the Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) family has seen increasing interest from customers who want to enforce application centric policies all the way to the virtual edge of the data center.

Cisco AVS is a derivative of the Nexus 1000V virtual switch, which is the market leading 3rd party virtual switch in the industry.   Nexus 1000V has accumulated more than 10,000 customers and has been deployed in large-scale service providers to large enterprises. Recently Cisco announced Nexus 1000V support for vSphere 6.0 releases. VMware has also announced to continue supporting Cisco Nexus 1000V in vSphere 6.0 and later releases.

VMware has supported and re-sold Nexus 1000V since we jointly launched the product. Recently (Feb 2nd 2015) VMware has announced that they will stop re-selling product/post-sales support for Nexus 1000V. Cisco will continue to sell and support Nexus 1000V for all customers.

Cisco AVS uses exactly the same vSphere APIs that the Nexus 1000V uses. Cisco AVS has always been supported by Cisco since the launch of ACI and will continue to be supported by Cisco. Currently, ACI with Cisco AVS is supported in vSphere 5.1 and vSphere 5.5 releases. With the latest release 5.2(1)SV3(1.5), Cisco AVS supports the Data Center Micro Segmentation delivered by the ACI. We plan to release vSphere 6.0 support for ACI with Cisco AVS later in second half of CY 2015. Cisco is committed to deliver on the strong customer interest in Cisco AVS and have multiple successful production deployments of Cisco AVS with ACI across our customer install base.

Customers who use either Cisco Nexus 1000V or Cisco AVS are assured that Cisco will continue to innovate and support these products via Cisco Support channel.

To ease adoption, Cisco AVS product and support is included as part of the Cisco ACI product and support agreement. No additional services or products need to be purchased.