Beginning with the Cisco APIC Release 3.1(1), the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) supports the Cisco ACI Virtual Edge. Cisco ACI Virtual Edge is the next generation of the Application Virtual Switch (AVS) for Cisco ACI environments. Cisco ACI Virtual Edge is a hypervisor-independent distributed service VM that leverages the native distributed virtual switch that belongs to the hypervisor. Cisco ACI Virtual Edge runsin the userspace, operates as a virtual leaf, and is managed by the Cisco ApplicationPolicy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).
If you use Cisco AVS, you can migrate to Cisco ACI Virtual Edge; if you use VMware VDS, you can run Cisco ACI Virtual Edge on top of it. Decoupling the Cisco ACI Virtual Edge from the kernel space makes the solution adaptable to different hypervisors. It also facilitates simple upgrades as Cisco ACI Virtual Edge is not tied to hypervisor upgrades. Cisco ACI Virtual Edge implements the OpFlex protocol for control plane communication. It supports two modes of traffic forwarding: local switching and no local switching.
Cisco ACI Virtual Edge Release 1.1(1a) supports only the VMware hypervisor. It leverages the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS), which is configured in private VLAN (PVLAN) mode.
When network administrators create a Cisco ACI Virtual Edge VMM domain on Cisco APIC, they must associate the domain with a range of VLANs to be used for PVLAN pair association of port groups on the DVS. Server administrators do not need to associate PVLANs to port groups on vCenter because Cisco APIC automatically associates PVLAN pairs with the endpoint groups (EPGs).
