Overview

Updated: June 13, 2026

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An overview of deploying Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Virtual on Nutanix, including platform compatibility, required software versions, supported hypervisors, resource requirements, and guidance for installation and configuration using Nutanix infrastructure.

Nutanix AHV is a native bare metal Type-1 hypervisor, Hyper-converged Infrastructure HCI with cloud enabled features and functionality.

This chapter describes how the Firewall Management Center Virtual functions in the Nutanix environment with AHV hypervisor, including feature support, system requirements, guidelines, and limitations.

You can deploy the Firewall Management Center Virtual on Nutanix AHV.

System Requirements

We recommend you do not decrease the default settings: 32 GB RAM for most the Firewall Management Center Virtual instances. To improve performance, you can always increase a virtual appliance’s memory and number of CPUs, depending on your available resources.

Memory and Resource Requirements

You can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified OS images using Nutanix AHV. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, and so forth. See the Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Compatibility Guide for hypervisor compatibility.
Check for the latest Release Notes for details on whether a new release affects your environment. You may be required to increase resources to deploy the latest version.
The specific hardware used for the Firewall Management Center Virtual deployments can vary, depending on the number of instances deployed and usage requirements. Each virtual appliance you create requires a minimum resource allocation—memory, number of CPUs, and disk space—on the host machine.
The following lists the recommended and default settings for the Firewall Management Center Virtual appliance on Nutanix AHV:
Processors
- Requires 4 vCPUs
Memory
- Minimum required 28 GB / Recommended (default) 32 GB RAM
  
  The Firewall Management Center Virtual platform fails if you allocate less than 28 GB RAM to the virtual appliance.
Networking
- Supports virtio drivers
- Supports one management interface
Host storage per Virtual Machine
- The Firewall Management Center Virtual requires 250 GB
- Supports virtio and scsi block devices
Console
- Supports terminal server via telnet

Prerequisites

Versions


Manager Version	Device Version
Firewall Device Manager 7.0	Firewall Threat Defense 7.0
Firewall Management Center 7.0	Firewall Threat Defense 7.0

See the Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Compatibility Guide for the most current information about hypervisor support for the Firewall Threat Defense Virtual.

Download the Firewall Management Center qcow2 file from Cisco.com and put it on your Nutanix Prism Web Console:

https://software.cisco.com/download/navigator.html

Note

A Cisco.com login and Cisco service contract are required.

Firewall Management Center Virtual Licenses

Configure all license entitlements for the security services from the Firewall Management Center.
See Licensing the System in the Secure Firewall Management Center Configuration Guide for more information about how to manage licenses.

Nutanix Components and Versions


Component	Version
Nutanix Acropolis Operating System (AOS)	5.15.5 LTS and later without VPC support. 6.8 and later with VPC support.
Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC)	4.0.0.1
Nutanix AHV	20201105.12 and later
Nutanix Prism Web Console	-

Guidelines and Limitations

Supported Features

Deployment Mode–Standalone

Unsupported Features

The Firewall Management Center Virtual appliances do not have serial numbers. The System > Configuration page shows either None or Not Specified depending on the virtual platform.

Nested hypervisors (Nutanix AHV running on top of ESXi) are not supported. Only Nutanix standalone cluster deployments are supported.
High Availability is not supported.
Nutanix AHV does not support SR-IOV and DPDK-OVS