Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Virtual Getting Started Guide

About Virtual Appliance Performance

Updated: February 5, 2026

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Overview

Firewall Management Center Virtual Default and Minimum Memory Requirements

Overview

Learn about the performance considerations and resource requirements for virtual appliances. Identify factors that affect throughput, confirm supported limits and memory requirements, and allocate CPU and memory resources to maintain reliable operation.

It is not possible to accurately predict throughput and processing capacity for virtual appliances. A number of factors heavily influence performance, such as the:

Amount of memory and CPU capacity of the host
Number of total virtual machines running on the host
Network performance, interface speed, and number of sensing interfaces deployed
Amount of resources assigned to each virtual appliance
Level of activity of other virtual appliances sharing the host
Complexity of policies applied to a virtual device

If the throughput is not satisfactory, adjust the resources assigned to the virtual appliances that share the host.

Each virtual appliance you create requires a certain amount of memory, CPUs, and hard disk space on the host. Do not decrease the default settings, as they are the minimum required to run the system software. However, to improve performance, you can increase a virtual appliance’s memory and number of CPUs, depending on your available resources.

The following table lists the supported Firewall Management Center Virtual limits.

Table 1. Supported Management Center Virtual Limits
Component	FMCv2/FMCv10/FMCv25	FMCv300
vCPU	8/4 vCPUs	32 vCPUs
Memory	32 GB	64 GB
Event storage space	250 GB	2.2 TB
Maximum network map size (hosts/users)	50,000/50,000	150,000/150,000
Maximum event rate (events per second)	5,000	12,000 eps

Firewall Management Center Virtual Default and Minimum Memory Requirements

All the Firewall Management Center Virtual implementations now have the same RAM requirements: 32 GB required (64 GB for the FMCv300). Upgrades to Version 6.6.0+ will fail if you allocate less than 32 GB to the virtual appliance. After upgrade, the health monitor will alert if you lower the memory allocation.

These new memory requirements enforce uniform requirements across all virtual environments, improve performance, and allow you to take advantage of new features and functionality. We recommend you do not decrease the default settings. To improve performance, you can increase a virtual appliance’s memory and number of CPUs, depending on your available resources.

As of the Version 6.6.0 release, lower-memory instance types for cloud-based Firewall Management Center Virtual deployments (AWS, Azure) are fully deprecated. You cannot create the new Firewall Management Center Virtual instances using them, even for earlier versions. You can continue running existing instances.

The following table summarizes pre-upgrade requirements for lower-memory Firewall Management Center Virtual deployments.

Table 2. Firewall Management Center Virtual Memory Requirements for Version 6.6.0+ Upgrades
Platform	Pre-Upgrade Action	Details
VMware	Allocate 32 GB minimum.	Power off the virtual machine first. For instructions, see the VMware documentation.
KVM	Allocate 32 GB minimum.	For instructions, see the documentation for your KVM environment.
AWS	Resize instances: From c3.xlarge to c3.4xlarge. From c3.2.xlarge to c3.4xlarge. From c4.xlarge to c4.4xlarge. From c4.2xlarge to c4.4xlarge. We also offer a c5.4xlarge instance for new deployments.	Stop the instance before you resize. Note that when you do this, data on the instance store volume is lost, so migrate your instance store-backed instance first. Additionally, if your management interface does not have an Elastic IP address, its public IP address is released. For instructions, see the documentation on changing your instance type in the AWS user guide for Linux instances.
Azure	Resize instances: From Standard_D3_v2 to Standard_D4_v2.	Use the Azure portal or PowerShell. You do not need to stop the instance before you resize, but stopping may reveal additional sizes. Resizing restarts a running virtual machine. For instructions, see the Azure documentation on resizing a Windows VM.
GCP	Allocate memory based on the GCP instance type.	See GCP Machine Type Support for more information.
OCI	Allocate memory based on the OCI instance type.	See OCI Compute Shapes for more information.
OpenStack	Allocate 32 GB minimum.	See Memory and resource requirements for more information.
HyperFlex	Allocate 32 GB minimum.	See Host System Requirements for more information.
Nutanix	Allocate 32 GB minimum.	See Host System Requirements for more information.

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