Cisco NX-OS End of Life (EOL) Dates & Support Timeline

Cisco NX-OS lifecycle status — the real story

Cisco NX-OS in standalone mode on the Nexus 3000 and 9000 series, modelled per major release train. Releases 10.3 to 10.6 have no End-of-Sale/End-of-Life bulletin; their dates come from the release table in Cisco's Software Lifecycle Support Statement for NX-OS on N9000 (guide_c07-658595, updated October 9, 2026), which prints EoSWM and a combined EoVSS/LDoS date for 10.2 to 10.6. Releases 6.1(2)I1 to 10.2 follow their own bulletins on the Nexus 9000 EoS/EoL notice listing (read 2026-10-09 in a browser, every value read twice). Milestone mapping: support = End of SW Maintenance Releases, eol = End of Vulnerability/Security Support, extendedSupport = Last Date of Support; End-of-Sale and the announcement date are carried as extra fields where a bulletin prints them. For 10.3 to 10.6 the statement prints EoVSS and LDoS as one date ('This milestone also aligns with the LDoS'), so eol and extendedSupport carry the same printed date; for 10.2 it prints them separately (February 28, 2025 / August 31, 2025), matching the 10.2(x) bulletin.

10.3: the statement footnotes that 10.3 is extended to support EX platforms until their hardware Last Date of Support, for EX platforms only; the row keeps the all-platform date (February 28, 2027). The statement also says Nexus products receive vulnerability support through the hardware Last Day of Support on the final supported NX-OS release.

9.3 has two bulletins. 9.3(x) (EOL14694, amended, updated January 31, 2024) covers the train and is the only source for the 9.3 line. 9.3(16) has its own later bulletin (announced April 7, 2026), which prints End-of-Sale, Last Ship and End of SW Maintenance all on April 7, 2026 and Last Date of Support December 31, 2027, but End of Vulnerability/Security Support 'August 31 2025', a date before its own announcement and before its own end of maintenance. Because that bulletin contradicts itself, 9.3(16) is not published as a separate line here; it will be added when Cisco amends the bulletin.

Bulletins that cover two trains apply the same dates to both (7.0(3)I5 and I6; 7.0(3)I2 and I3, the latter only 7.0(3)I3(1); 7.0(3)I1 and IX1; 7.0(3)F1 and F2; 6.1(2)I1 and I2). 7.0(3)F3 builds 1 to 2 are in the F1/F2 bulletin (EOL12944) and builds 3 to 5 in EOL13183; the F3 line follows EOL13183, the train's last builds. Bulletins for 7.0(3)I1/IX1, 7.0(3)F1 to F3 and 6.1(2)I1 to I3 print no security-support milestone, so eol is true (their Last Date of Support has passed); no date is filled.

Release dates are not stated in the bulletins or the lifecycle statement, and the Nexus 9000 release-notes index shows document update dates, not release dates, so releaseDate is null on every line. Not modelled: NX-OS on Nexus 7000/7700 (6.2, 7.3, 8.x), Nexus 5000/6000 and MDS 9000, which Cisco ends on separate per-platform bulletins, and ACI-mode switch software.

KEV context (CISA catalog 2026.10.08): CISA files NX-OS flaws under the product string 'NX-OS' (CVE-2024-20399, added 2024-07-02); the join is by display name and no version scoping is asserted here.

Verification: cisco.com is bot-blocked for plain fetches (Akamai), so this file is a frozen manual read; each line links its own bulletin or the lifecycle statement, and the Nexus 9000 notice listing plus the lifecycle statement's release table are the pages to re-read.

Cisco NX-OS release and support pattern

Of the 22 release lines tracked, 18 are past end of life and 4 are still within support; 8 are marked end of life without a published date. The next scheduled end of life is 10.3 on February 28, 2027 — 108 days from this build. The longest-supported line currently published is 10.6, to February 28, 2030. Upstream also publishes an extended-support phase for 22 lines, shown in the table above.

Computed from the tracked release data at every build — the figures above are the dates in the table, restated, not an editorial estimate.

Cisco NX-OS security intelligence

CISA KEV history: Cisco NX-OS is named in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog 1 time, most recently on 2024-07-02. Derived from CISA's live catalog at every build.

What does Cisco NX-OS end of life mean for your organization?

When a version of Cisco NX-OS reaches end of life, the maintainers stop issuing security patches. Vulnerabilities discovered after this date are publicly disclosed on the National Vulnerability Database, exploit code appears on GitHub, and your systems remain permanently exposed.

The CVE blind spot: A CVE-based scan does not show the accumulation of unpatched vulnerabilities in EOL software. Some scanners flag unsupported versions of common products, but coverage varies, and none of them give you the date in advance. With a zero-day, nobody knows about the vulnerability. With EOL software, the vulnerability is public — listed, rated, and often weaponized — but no vendor patch is coming. This is one of the most dangerous gaps in enterprise security posture.

Organizations running EOL Cisco NX-OS should treat it as a vulnerability class in their risk register, apply compensating controls (network segmentation, enhanced monitoring, access restriction), and prioritize migration to a supported version.

Your options when Cisco NX-OS reaches end of life

There are four realistic paths. Which one is right depends far more on how long the system needs to keep running than on the version you are on today.

How to choose, in one question: how many more years does this system need to run? Under a year, extended support (where it exists) is usually cheaper than an emergency migration. One to three years, migrate — support purchased repeatedly costs more than doing the project once, and the project only gets harder as the version ages. Indefinitely, migrate now and plan the next migration before it surprises you.

Worth saying plainly, because vendors selling extended support rarely will: extended support is often the more expensive choice over a multi-year horizon. It is the right answer when a deadline is genuinely unreachable, not as a default. Compare the annual fee against the one-time cost of migrating before committing to either.

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