Cisco Application Virtual Switch is a hypervisor-resident distributed virtual switch that is specifically designed for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and managed by the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC). Cisco AVS implements the OpFlex protocol for control plane communication.

Cisco AVS supports two modes of traffic forwarding: local switching and no local switching. The forwarding mode is selected during Cisco AVS installation.

Cisco AVS is supported as a vLeaf for Cisco APIC with the VMware ESXi hypervisor. It manages a data center defined by the VMware vCenter Server.

Cisco AVS is compatible with any upstream physical access layer switch that complies with the Ethernet standard, including Cisco Nexus switches. Cisco AVS is compatible with any server hardware listed in the VMware Hardware Codmpatibility Guide.

You can find information about Cisco AVS in the following documents on Cisco.com:

• Cisco AVS Release Notes

• Cisco AVS Installation Guide

• Cisco AVS Configuration Guide

• Cisco AVS Troubleshooting Guide