Introduction
Cisco hardware routers are normally shipped with the Cisco IOS XE software pre-installed. Because the Cisco CSR 1000v Series Cloud Services Router is not hardware-based, you must download the Cisco IOS XE software from Cisco.com and install it directly onto the virtual machine. However, as part of the initial installation process, you must first provision the attributes of the VM so that the Cisco CSR 1000v software can install and boot.
Note |
For information about deploying the Cisco CSR 1000v in an Amazon Web Services environment, seehttp://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/csr1000/software/aws/csraws.html. |
Note |
For information about deploying the Cisco CSR 1000v in a Microsoft Azure environment, see https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/csr1000/software/azu/b_csr1000config-azure.html. |
The figure below ("Cisco CSR 1000v Installation Task Workflow") shows the high-level tasks required to install the Cisco CSR 1000v on the VM. The different installation options are dependent on the hypervisor being used. See the following sections for more information.
Virtual Machine Processing Resources
The Cisco CSR1000V is a low-latency application and might not function properly when the processing resources on the host side are over subscribed. By default, most hypervisors support overcommitting the processing resources. However, for Cisco CSR1000V, if you oversubscribe and do not schedule the virtual CPUs (vCPUs) reliably, you could experience packet processing drops, error messages, or system outages.
The Cisco CSR1000V vCPUs must be scheduled by the host hypervisor to run on real physical cores. Each hypervisor has various controls that influence the scheduling of the vCPUs to the physical cores. As a best practice, Cisco recommends that you to use a ratio of 1:1 for the vCPUs to real physical cores.
For detailed information on virtual machine processing resources, see the respective hypervisor tuning guides provided by the hypervisor. Additionally, you can refer to the appropriate hypervisor sections in this guide that describe the possible settings to increase the performance and improve the overall system determinism.