Heads Up! No More Third Party Virtual Switches API For ESXi

Update 2017-04-01

No it is official, see VMware KB 2149722 for more information.

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Since I know quite a few of my customers are using third party switches in their vSphere environment instead of the VMware native Virtual Standard Switch (VSS) or vNetwork Distributed Switch (VDS) i wanted to provide you with some information I have seen in some communities over the past few days.

The information I have see says that VMware will soon deprecate the API used by third party switches and remove it after vSphere 6.5 U1. Some customer seems to have received the information in a letter (see this picture which is not on my web site) but I haven’t been able to find it on the VMware public website. The only public available information I have seen is the following:

• VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix – Where it says End Of General Support 20180919 for Cisco Nexus 1000V (resell)
• VMware Network Virtualisation Blog – Which include the following statement:
  • “VMware will have a single virtual switch strategy that focuses on two sets of native virtual switch offerings – VMware vSphere® Standard Switch and vSphere Distributed Switch™ for VMware vSphere, and the Open virtual switch (OVS)”

This change will mean that the following third party switches must be migrated to VSS, VDS or OVS:

• Cisco
  • AVS
  • Nexus 1000v
  • VM-FEX
• HPE 5900v
• IBM 5000v

When I get this confirmed I’ll update the blog post but for now you at least know what to expect in the future.