Cisco Secure Access Help

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Cisco Secure Access Help

Deploy VAs in Nutanix

Updated: September 15, 2026

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Provides instructions for completing the Deploy VAs in Nutanix workflow in Cisco Secure Access. It explains the sequence of actions and relevant settings presented in the procedure.

Deploy Cisco Secure Access Virtual Appliances in Nutanix.

Note
You must deploy at least two Virtual Appliances (VAs) in a Secure Access Site. It is critical that these VAs are not cloned or copied in any way. Configure and set up each VA manually.

Before you begin

  • Full Admin user role. For more information, see Manage Accounts.

  • For information about the network requirements for deploying VAs, see Prerequisites for Virtual Appliances.

  • Virtual Appliance deployments are supported on the current LTS version of Nutanix AHV only.

Configure Authentication for the Virtual Appliances

Before you can download the Virtual Appliance images in Secure Access, you must configure your Secure Access API keys for the Virtual Appliances in your organization. Secure Access enables the Download Components button only after the API keys for the VAs are configured. For more information, see Configure Authentication for Virtual Appliances.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to Connectors > DNS Forwarders and click Download Components.


    DNS Forwarders section with an option to download components

  2. Click Download for VA for hyper-V.

    Download Components section with an option to download a virtual machine

    1. Secure Access generates and downloads to your computer a .tar file unique to your deployment.

      This tar file includes:

      • a .zip file containing the virtual hard disks that need to be deployed on Nutanix

      • a signature file

      • a Cisco public certificate to validate the signature

      • a readme file

  3. Extract the contents of the tar file.

    To verify the integrity of the downloaded file, validate the signature by following the instructions provided in the readme file. When successful, a message saying Verified OK will appear.

    Run:

    tar –xvf <tar filename> -C <Destination folder>

  4. Extract the downloaded zip file.

    You will find two folders—Virtual Hard Disks and Virtual Machines—and a config file. Navigate to the Virtual Hard Disks folder and find the forwarder-va.vhd and dynamic.vhd files.

  5. Log into the Nutanix AHV console, navigate to Settings > Image Configuration, and create two images (VAForwarder and VADynamic) by uploading the forwarder-va.vhd and dynamic.vhd respectively.

  6. Create a new VM with at least 1 VCPU (1 core), 1 GB RAM, and 1 NIC.

  7. Add a new disk using the VAForwarder image. Choose the operation Clone from Image Service and Bus Type as SCSI.

  8. Remove the CD-ROM. Add another disk using the VADynamic image with operation as Clone from Image Service and Bus Type as SCSI.

    Note
    The disk order is important. The VAForwarder should be Disk 0, the VADynamic should be Disk 1.

    You can now power on the VA and configure it using either the console or by initiating an SSH connection to the VA. For information about configuring VAs, see Configure Virtual Appliances.

    For more information about how to enhance throughput of the VA on Nutanix, see Enabling RSS Virtio-Net Multi-Queue by Increasing the Number of VNIC Queues.