Cisco ACI long-lived releases are software releases intended to help you stay on a given release on a long-term basis (up to approximately 18 months), while benefiting from frequent maintenance drops to ensure quality and stability. Cisco may support two long-lived releases at any given point of time. However, active maintenance will be focused primarily on the latest long-lived release. These releases will be maintained for a longer time span than other releases. Long-lived releases are recommended for the deployment of widely adopted functions or for networks that will not be upgraded frequently.

All long-lived releases support upgrade or downgrade to the next or previous long-lived release. See the APIC Upgrade/Downgrade Support Matrix for confirmed support.

Note

Some release branches might be supported as long-lived releases while others might not be supported. For example, there might be three 2.x release branches: 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3. However, one of the three 2.x release branches might be supported as a long-lived release (2.2), while the other two release branches (2.1 and 2.3) might not be supported as long-lived releases.

Cisco ACI short-lived releases are stable, quality releases delivered for new feature functionalities. These releases have limited maintenance support for a duration of six months after the initial release, after which there will be no active maintenance. In addition, these releases will not have an EOS announcement.

As with every Cisco ACI release, upgrades may be supported from two previous releases to the short-lived release. See the APIC Upgrade/Downgrade Support Matrix for confirmed support.

• The life cycle of a major long-lived release starts with the first customer shipment (FCS) of the first minor release.

• The major release then enters the maintenance release introduction phase, in which several releases are made available to address product defects.

• Afterward, the major release transitions to the mature maintenance phase. In this phase, the release receives defect repairs only for severity 1 and severity 2 defects found by the customer. Defects found internally are addressed on a case-by-case basis.

• All long-lived releases support upgrade or downgrade to the next or previous long-lived release last maintenance version respectively

We recommend that customers with new and existing Cisco Nexus 9000 ACI-Mode Switches and Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) deployments choose from the following long-lived releases:

We recommend that you upgrade to the latest maintenance release and patch for a particular long-lived release version. You can download the latest Cisco Nexus 9000 ACI-Mode Switches and Cisco APIC deployments from the appropriate Cisco Software Download pages.