Cisco 1000v Distributed Switch ? Yes or No for new Builds

[Almero]

Morning guys , hoping to get your opinion on this matter

I have quite a few clients on UCS blades , with vSphere 5.1 or 5.5 that want to upgrade to 6.02 or even 6.5 .

When designing the new infrastructure , do we retain the Cisco 1000v Switches , or just go for the standard DVS ?

Cisco engineers tell me we should keep the 1000v , but VMware Lifecycle doc indicates September 2018 is the end of it .

I what are the gains ? Why is it "better " ?

Would you guys recommend replacing it with the standard offer to enhance the lifetime of the newly built infrastructure  ?

From my personal point of view , I think standard DVS will do most things we need , and most of my huge team will be able to administer it

Also , no additional cost . In fact from this article , it appear N1K switches cannot do all the jobs DVS can

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/comparing-vsphere-distributed-switch-and-cisco-nexus-1000v-swi...

Any comments ?

Any real life experience is most welcome

[reub]

The Cisco Nexus 1000v is currently not supported on vSphere 6.5.  I have managed to get it to work with a bit of installation hackery (it seems to work fine once you can get over a few installation hurdles).  That'll be your first problem.

One of the big things I really like about the Nexus1000v is that I can poll and have SNMP counters of all of my virtual interfaces assigned to hosts within the Nexus virtual switch.  This makes for interesting and useful graphs within your monitoring systems.  I don't think (but stand to be corrected) that you can get this sort of output with the ESXi DVS.

The integration with vCenter is pretty clever but it is quite a learning experience to get it all set up and running.

[technolink]

We plan to migrate from 6.0 to 6.5 but nexus 1000v is still not supported. may you hint me out hw you did manage to get it work ?

did you do an upgrade ?

[reub]

In short, the steps are:

- Upgrade (not clean install), vCenter.  This is the easiest way to keep the n1k plugin functional on the system.

- Clean install ESXi hosts if you want to, however you'll need to rebuild the n1k vib (adjust the dependency on esx-base 6.0 and rebuild) and install that vib after you've done the host install.  I haven't tried an upgrade so I don't know how that will work given the dependency in the vib on esx-common 6.0 .

Just bear in mind that it's not supported either by VMware or Cisco, hopefully it will be soon but it's not yet. I would be a bit wary before you go live with this unsupported configuration.  It all appears to work just fine but you likely won't get much help if you need support.

[chr1s86]

I also want to get away from N1kv!

But I have to host a snmp solution for our network team to collect the VM traffic stats first :smileyconfused:

Does anyone have a solution yet?

[thibaudpeter]

Get away from Cisco 1000v.
VMware Distributed Switch does the work correctly

[marvinmarcos]

Hi everyone,

Just want to respond to the thread that an update was done for KB Removing a Cisco Nexus 1000V from vCenter Server (1020542). I am certain some of your questions can be answered by visiting the article. Thank you.