Cisco Catalyst Center Global Manager Deployment Guide, Release 1.3.1

Additional deployment requirements

Updated: April 2, 2026

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Overview

Virtual machine minimum requirements
Server requirements
Supported browsers
Scale numbers
Security limitations
User access role requirements

Overview

Describes the requirements that need to be met to deploy a Catalyst Center Global Manager virtual appliance.

Catalyst Center Global Manager is deployed as a virtual machine (VM) on VMware ESXi version 7.x or later.

You must meet these requirements listed here to deploy a Catalyst Center Global Manager virtual appliance. For performance tips on the most critical areas of VMware vSphere, refer to:

VMware vSphere Client 7.0: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 7.0, Update 3 (PDF)
VMware vSphere Client 8.0: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 8.0 (PDF)

Virtual machine minimum requirements


Requirement	Detail
Virtualization platform and hypervisor	VMware vSphere (which includes ESXi and vCenter Server) 7.0.x or later, including all updates.
Processors	Intel Xeon Scalable server processor (Cascade Lake or newer) or AMD EPYC Gen2 with 2.1 GHz or better clock speed. Dedicate 8 vCPUs with a 16 GHz reservation to the VM.
Hard Disk Drive (HDD)	100 GB + 550 GB (2 HDDs).
Memory	16 GB RAM.
I/O Bandwidth	180 MB/sec.
Input/output operations per second (IOPS) rate	2000-2500, with less than 5 ms of I/O completion latency.
Latency	Catalyst Center Global Manager to Catalyst Center connectivity: 350 ms.
Active Sessions	The system supports up to 10 active user connections when network administrators log in to Catalyst Center Global Manager.

Server requirements


Requirement	Detail
vCenter and ESXi	7.0x+.
Intel CPU	2.1 GHz and later.

Supported browsers

The Catalyst Center Global Manager GUI is compatible with these HTTPS-enabled browsers:

Google Chrome: Version 134 or later
Mozilla Firefox: Version 120.0.1 or later

Screen resolution:

Minimum: 1368 x 768 pixels
Recommended: 1920 x 1080 pixels

Ensure that the client systems used to log in to Catalyst Center Global Manager have 64-bit operating systems and browsers.

Scale numbers

The table lists the number of controllers, users and sites that Catalyst Center Global Manager supports.


Component	Maximum Number Supported
Controllers	25 controllers Note 3-node controllers are treated as a single controller within the 25-controller scale limit
Users	10 active users
Sites	25,000 (maximum aggregated sites) 100 (sites on multiple controllers) 5 (same site on maximum number of controllers)

Note

For more information on the Catalyst Center scale limit, refer to the Cisco Catalyst Center Data Sheet.

Security limitations

Catalyst Center Global Manager does not support managing Catalyst Centers with:

Disaster Recovery (DR)
Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS)
IPv6 configurations-only setups
Air-gapped configurations

User access role requirements

You have matching user accounts on both Catalyst Center Global Manager and Catalyst Center.
You get the access permissions come from individual Catalyst Centers.

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