Cisco Catalyst 8000V Virtual Routers

Cisco Catalyst 8000V virtual routers

Cisco Catalyst 8000V Edge Software or Cisco Catalyst 8000V, is a virtual, form-factor router deployed on a virtual machine (VM) running on an x86 server hardware.

Cisco Catalyst 8000V includes a virtual Route Processor and a virtual Forwarding Processor (FP) as part of its architecture, and provides secure connectivity from an enterprise location such as a branch office or a data center, to a public or a private cloud.

Benefits

Cisco Catalyst 8000V offers these virtualization benefits that are listed in this section:

  • Hardware independence: The Cisco Catalyst 8000V router uses the benefits of virtualization in the cloud to provide hardware independence. Since Cisco Catalyst 8000V runs on a virtual machine, you can use this router on any x86 hardware that the virtualization platform supports.

  • Sharing of resources: The resources used by Cisco Catalyst 8000V are managed by the hypervisor, and these resources can be shared amongst the VMs. The amount of hardware resources that the VM server allocates to a specific VM can be regulated and resources can also be reallocated to other VMs on the server.

  • Flexibility in deployment: VMs can be moved from one server to another. A Cisco Catalyst 8000V instance can be moved from a server in one physical location to a server in another physical location without moving any hardware resources.

  • Enhanced software security through Secure Object Store: In Cisco Catalyst 8000V, storage partitions for NVRAM, licensing, and other data are created as Object stores. The individual Object stores are encrypted to ensure data security, and this product is Cisco Secure Development lifecycle (CSDL) compliant. Further, Cisco Catalyst 8000V supports a 16G disk profile.

Operating modes

Cisco Catalyst 8000V virtual router runs on Cisco IOS XE and Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN, and supports these modes:

  • Autonomous mode: Offers a subset of the Cisco IOS XE software features and technologies, and provides Cisco IOS XE security and switching features on a virtualization platform.

  • Controller mode: Delivers comprehensive SD-WAN, WAN gateway, and network services functions in the virtual and cloud environments.

  • SD-Routing mode: Offers an operating environment where a Cisco Catalyst 8000V instance operating in autonomous routing mode can be managed by the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN manager.

This guide provides the overview, installation, and configuration information for Cisco Catalyst 8000V running on Cisco IOS XE or autonomous mode.

Cisco Catalyst 8000V command line interface

Before you install or configure this router, set up access to the command line interface (CLI). The CLI is the primary interface for configuring and using Cisco Catalyst 8000V in autonomous mode. You can accomplish this in these ways:

  • Provision a serial port in the VM to connect and access the Cisco IOS XE CLI commands.

  • Use a serial port to manage a Cisco Catalyst 8000V VM only if the underlying hypervisor supports associating a serial port with a VM. For more details, see the respective hypervisor installation information that is available in this document.

  • Use the remote SSH/Telnet to access the Cisco IOS XE CLI commands. By default, Telnet is disabled for security reasons. In an on-premises deployment, SSH is also disabled. Although SSH is preferred for remote user management, you must enable SSH manually in an on-premises deployment.

    In cloud deployments, SSH is enabled by default. To access SSH, ensure that your cloud security settings allow SSH connectivity for both inbound and outbound traffic.

The software for Cisco Catalyst 8000V uses the standard Cisco IOS XE CLI commands and conventions. The commands are not case sensitive, and you can abbreviate the commands and parameters if the abbreviations contain enough letters to be different from any other currently available commands or parameters. To access all the features of Cisco IOS XE CLI and how to use them, see the System Management Configuration Guide.

Router Interfaces

The Cisco Catalyst 8000V router interfaces perform the same functionality as those on hardware-based Cisco routers. The Cisco Catalyst 8000V interfaces function as follows:

  • The interfaces are logically named as the Gigabit Ethernet (GE) interfaces.

  • The available interface numbering depends on the Cisco Catalyst 8000V version.

When you first boot the device, the Cisco Catalyst 8000V router interfaces are mapped to the vNIC interfaces on the VM based on the vNIC enumeration to the Cisco Catalyst 8000V. On subsequent boot, the Cisco Catalyst 8000V router interfaces are mapped to the vNIC MAC addresses.

For more information, see Mapping the Cisco Catalyst 8000V Network Interfaces to the VM Network Interfaces.

Interface Numbering

  • The interface port numbering is from 1 and up to the number of interfaces supported. See Installation requirements to know the supported vNICs and the minimum and maximum number of vNICs supported for each VM instance.

  • Gigabit Ethernet interface 0 is not supported.

  • You can designate any interface as the management interface. You can designate a management interface by performing the appropriate Day0 bootstrapping mechanisms available for your target environment. For more details, see Day 0 Configuration.