Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Virtual Getting Started Guide

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Guidelines and Limitations

Updated: February 5, 2026

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Overview

Consider these guidelines and limitations for deploying Management Center Virtual on KVM. Learn about unsupported configurations, appliance restrictions, and high availability and licensing requirements to plan your deployment correctly.

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

  • Nested hypervisors (KVM running on top of VMware/ESXi) are not supported. Only bare-metal KVM deployments are supported.

  • Cloning a virtual machine is not supported.

High Availability support

  • Management Center Virtual 300 (FMCv300) for KVM—A new scaled Firewall Management Center Virtual image is available for KVM that supports managing up to 300 devices and has higher disk capacity.

  • Firewall Management Center Virtual High Availability (HA) is supported.

  • The two Firewall Management Center Virtual appliances in a high availability configuration must be the same model.

  • To establish the Firewall Management Center Virtual HA, Firewall Management Center Virtual requires an extra management center virtual license entitlement for each Secure Firewall Threat Defense (formerly Firepower Threat Defense) device that it manages in the HA configuration. However, the required Firewall Threat Defense feature license entitlement for each threat defense device has no change regardless of the Firewall Management Center Virtual HA configuration. See License Requirements for threat defense devices in a High Availability Pair in the Secure Firewall Management Center Device Configuration Guide for guidelines about licensing.

  • If you break the Firewall Management Center Virtual HA pair, the extra Firewall Management Center Virtual license entitlement is released, and you need only one entitlement for each Firewall Threat Defense device. See High Availability in the Secure Firewall Management Center Device Configuration Guide for more information and guidelines about high availability.