Cisco Catalyst Center 3.1.x on ESXi Deployment Guide

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Deployment requirements

Updated: March 18, 2026

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Overview

Outlines the best practices, VM minimum requirements, scale numbers, and other requirements for a successful deployment.

Performance Best Practices

Certain requirements must be met to successfully deploy a Catalyst Center on ESXi virtual appliance. See performance tips for the most important aspects of VMware vSphere:

Virtual Machine Minimum Requirements

Table 1. Virtual Machine Minimum Requirements
Feature Description

Virtualization platform and hypervisor

VMware vSphere (which includes ESXi and vCenter Server) 7.0.x or later, including all patches.

Processors

Intel Xeon Scalable server processor (Cascade Lake or newer) or AMD EPYC Gen2 with 2.1 GHz or better clock speed.

32 vCPUs with 64-GHz reservation must be dedicated to the VM.

Memory

256-GB DRAM with 256-GB reservation must be dedicated to the VM.

Storage

3-TB solid-state drive (SSD).

Reserve additional datastore space if you plan to create backups of your virtual appliance. For information, see "Backup server requirements" in the Cisco Catalyst Center Administrator Guide.

I/O Bandwidth

180 MB/sec.

Input/output operations per second (IOPS) rate

2,000 to 2,500, with less than 5 ms of I/O completion latency.

Latency

Catalyst Center on ESXi to network device connectivity: 200 ms.
Caution

Any changes to the resource allocation or reservation of the Catalyst Center VM may adversely affect its operations and could result in failure.

Scale Numbers

The number of devices and site elements that Catalyst Center on ESXi supports:

Table 2. Nonfabric Deployment Scale Numbers
Network Component Maximum Number Supported

Access Points

4000

Devices

1000

Endpoints

25,000

Site Elements

2500
Table 3. Fabric Deployment Scale Numbers
Network Component Maximum Number Supported

Endpoints

25,000

Devices

2000

Access Points

3000

Site Elements

2500

Per-Fabric Site Scale

Fabric Nodes

500

VNs

64

IP Pools

100

For both nonfabric and fabric deployments, up to 10 concurrent user connections are supported for network admins to log in to Catalyst Center on ESXi.

Cisco Catalyst Assurance processes data using near real-time streaming analytics, which requires additional guarantees on resource availability. When operating Catalyst Center on ESXi close to maximum scale, the functionality may be impacted by uncontrolled external events, such as host resource oversubscriptions and edge use cases leading to a spike in resource usage. A number of things can indicate that these events are taking place, such as slow performance, data processing gaps, high I/O latency, and a CPU readiness percentage that's higher than normal.

Note

For more information about troubleshooting performance problems, see the "Troubleshoot and Enhance Performance" topic for your VMware vSphere version:

  • For VMware vSphere Client 7.0, click here.

  • For VMware vSphere Client 8.0, click here.

Catalyst Center VA Launcher Requirements

If you plan to use the CC VA Launcher to deploy and configure a virtual appliance, certain requirements must be met by the machine on which you'll run the app:

Feature Description

RAM

1 GB

Storage

  • 40 GB for the virtual appliance's OVA file

  • 50 MB for the launcher bundle

Supported operating systems

  • Linux: Ubuntu 20.04 or later

  • macOS (Intel and M1): macOS 14 and later

  • Microsoft Windows: Windows 10 and later

Sleep setting

Configure the machine to not go to sleep.

Additionally:

  • Ensure that the user who will run the CC VA Launcher has the privileges necessary to deploy the virtual appliance's OVA file and modify the appliance's virtual machine settings.

  • For the system you'll run the app on, configure its HTTP/network proxy settings (if applicable).

Supported Browsers

  • Mozilla Firefox, version 65 or later

  • Google Chrome, version 72 or later