vSphere 6 - Cisco Nexus 1000v support?

By | April 11, 2016

Last week VMware announced that decided to no longer offer Nexus 1000V through VMware sales or sell support for the Nexus 1000V through the VMware support organization as of Feb 2nd 2015. As to mentioned more, fortunately it does NOT IMPACT on existing use of the Nexus 1000V in a VMware vSphere® 5.x or older environment. It also has NO IMPACT on support already purchased from VMware for the Nexus 1000V. When I read below information:

VMware recommends that Nexus 1000V users move to the VMware vSphere® Distributed Switch™ (VDS) as it simplifies operations (e.g., upgrade) and provides advanced monitoring capabilities plus a broader feature set. VMware will also offer migration assistance to make this change. For additional details, please contact your VMware account team or support representative. Customers that use the Nexus 1000V already do so in conjunction with VMware vSphere® Enterprise Plus Edition™ and have the correct licensing in place to make this change.

I thought that Nexus 1000v would be not supported in vSphere 6.

Fortunately we didn't have to wait for information from Cisco so long and Feb 2nd 2015 Cisco announced:

We are happy to announce that the Nexus 1000V will continue to be supported in the latest vSphere 6 release which VMware recently announced. Customers who are currently running Nexus 1000V will be able to upgrade to the vSphere 6 release and the new vSphere 6 customers will have the Nexus 1000V as part of their choices for virtual networking.

So, for all customers who use Cisco Nexus 1000v, this Switch will be supported in vSphere 6!

Update 12.03.2015: Following VMware  vSphere 6 Release Notes we can find out that vSphere 6 supports Nexus 1000v:

Testing and certification of Cisco Nexus 1000V with vSphere 6.0 is not complete. Currently, VMware plans to support Nexus 1000V with vSphere 6.0 in traditional Nexus 1000V mode (leveraging the Virtual Supervisor Module, VSM). VMware does not support Nexus 1000V Application Virtual Switch (AVS) mode in vSphere 6.0 or any vSphere version.

Update 20.04.2015: I got some questions regarding version of Cisco Nexus 1000v supporting vSphere 6. The answer is: 5.2(1)SV3(1.4) or later. For more information please follow Cisco Nexus 1000v - 5.2(1)SV3(1.4) Release Notes available here. This is a Cisco support...

Update 03.2016: VMware supports Cisco Nexus 1000v since vSphere 6.0 U2.

Author: Mariusz

Architect (~ 15 years experience based on passion...) with strong background as a System Administrator and Engineer. Focused on Data Center Solutions: Virtualization/Cloud Computing and Storage/Backup Systems. Currently living in Poland.