The Cisco 8500 Series Controller provides centralized control, management, and troubleshooting for high-scale deployments in service provider and large campus deployments. The 8500 series provides flexibility to support multiple architectures in the same controller - centralized controller switched for campus, Cisco FlexConnect™ for lean branches managed over the WAN as well as mesh support for deployments where full Ethernet cabling is unavailable.

The Cisco 8500 Series Controller supports Application Visibility and Control (AVC). AVC includes the Network-Based Application Recognition 2 (NBAR-2) engine, Cisco's deep packet inspection (DPI) capability, which classifies applications, applies quality of service (QoS) settings to either drop or mark the traffic, and prioritizes business-critical applications in the network. AVC uses NetFlow Version 9 to export the flows. The Cisco 8500 Series controller also supports Bonjour Services Directory to enable Bonjour Services to be advertised and utilized in a separate Layer 3 network.