The Cisco Catalyst 9800-CL Cloud Wireless Controller (referred to as "controller" in this document) is a virtual wireless controller that is deployed on a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) server as a virtual machine (VM) instance on a Linux-based 64-bit guest operating system. This controller supports a subset of Cisco IOS XE software features and technologies, providing Cisco IOS XE features on a virtualization platform.

When the controller is deployed as a VM, the Cisco IOS XE software functions as if it were deployed on a traditional Cisco hardware platform.

The controller uses the benefits of virtualization to provide the following:

• Hardware independence—Because the controller runs on a VM, it can be supported on the x86 hardware that the virtualization platform supports.

• Sharing of resources—The resources used by the controller are managed by the hypervisor; these resources can be shared among VMs. The amount of hardware resources that the VM server allocates to a specific VM can be reallocated to another VM on the server.

• Flexibility in deployment—You can easily move a VM from one server to another. Thus, you can move the controller from a server in one physical location to a server in another physical location without moving any hardware resources.

You can perform software configuration and management of the controller using the following methods:

• Use the virtual video graphics array (VGA) console or the console on the virtual serial port to access the Cisco IOS XE CLI commands.

• Use remote SSH or Telnet to access the Cisco IOS XE CLI commands.

Note

The controller may reload when you run the show redundancy trace main command from the serial console. Serial console is not recommended for large scale deployments. We recommend that you use Telnet or SSH for this purpose. For more information on how to add a virtual serial port, see Adding Virtual Serial Port in Cisco Catalyst C9800-CL Wireless Controller Virtual Deployment Guide.

The controller can run as a VM. A VM is a software implementation of a computing environment in which an operating system or program can be installed. The VM typically emulates a physical computing environment, but requests for CPU, memory, hard disk, network, and other hardware resources are managed by a virtualization layer that translates these requests to the underlying physical hardware.

You can deploy an Open Virtualization Archive (OVA) file for ESXi. The OVA file package simplifies the process of deploying a VM by providing a complete definition of the parameters and resource allocation requirements for the new VM.

An OVA file consists of a descriptor (.ovf) file, a storage (.vmdk) file, and a manifest (.mf) file.

• Descriptor or .ovf file—An XML file with .ovf as the extension, and consisting of all the metadata about the package. It encodes all the product details, virtual hardware requirements, and licensing.

• Storage or .vmdk file—A file format that encodes a single virtual disk from a VM.

• Manifest or .mf file—An optional file that stores the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) key generated during packaging.

A hypervisor enables multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host machine. While each operating system appears to have the dedicated use of the host's processor, memory, and other resources, the hypervisor controls and allocates only the required resources to each operating system and ensures that the operating systems (VMs) do not disrupt each other.

Caution

The controller might crash while taking a snapshot. We recommend that you use RAID0 configuration on the UCS to avoid a crash.

• Ensure that you use VMware ESXi Version 5.5 or later.

The server and processor requirements are different, depending on the software release. The following table captures the server requirements: