Contents

• Hypervisor Requirements
• General Virtual Machine Requirements
• VMware ESXi Support Information
• VMware vSphere
• Supported VMware Features and Operations
• KVM-QEMU Support Information
• Supported KVM-QEMU Features and Operations
• Hypervisor Limitations

Hypervisor Requirements

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The Cisco IOS XRv Router supports selected hypervisors for installation. This chapter covers information about virtual machine requirements for hypervisors, VMware ESXi and KVM-QEMU hypervisor's support, and limitations.

• General Virtual Machine Requirements
• VMware ESXi Support Information
• KVM-QEMU Support Information
• Supported KVM-QEMU Features and Operations
• Hypervisor Limitations

General Virtual Machine Requirements

Regardless of hypervisor, all Cisco IOS XRv Router virtual machines must meet the following requirements:

Table 1 VM parameters

Parameter	Minimum	Maximum
Memory (RAM)	3 GB	8 GB
Hard Disk	1 disk, 3 GB	Primary disk must be 3 GB, secondary disk of arbitrary size can be added.
CPUs	1 CPU	8 CPUs in demonstration deployment. 1 CPU in production deployment.
Serial Ports	1 serial port (IOS XR console)	4 serial ports (XR console, XR aux port, 2 debugging ports)
NICs	1 NIC	128 (depending on hypervisor's capabilities)

VMware ESXi Support Information

The Cisco IOS XRv Router runs on the VMware ESXi hypervisor. You can use the same VMware ESXi hypervisor to run several VMs. Use the VMware vSphere Client GUI to create and manage VMs.

Note	The Cisco IOS XRv Router is compatible with VMware ESXi Server version 5.0 and later.

• VMware vSphere
• Supported VMware Features and Operations

VMware vSphere

VMs run on the VMware vSphere Hypervisor. You can use the same VMware vSphere hypervisor to run several VMs. Use the VMware vSphere Client GUI to create and manage VMs.

The VMware vSphere Client is an application for creating, configuring and managing VMs on the VMware vCenter Server. The Cisco IOS XRv Router can boot from a virtual disk located on the data store. You can perform basic administration tasks such as starting and stopping the Cisco IOS XRv Router, using the VMware vSphere Client.

VMware vCenter Server manages the vSphere environment and provides unified management of all the hosts and VMs in the data center from a single console.

For more information about how Cisco and VMware work together, see http:/​/​www.vmware.com/​cisco.

Supported VMware Features and Operations

VMware supports various features and operations that allow you to manage your virtual applications and perform operations.

Below is the list of VMware features and operations that are supported on the Cisco IOS XRv Router:

• Template
• Power On
• Power Off
• vSwitch
• E1000 NIC

For more information about VMware features and operations, see the VMware Documentation.

KVM-QEMU Support Information

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is an open-source, full-virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware, containing virtualization extensions. It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor-specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko.

Quick EMUlator (QEMU) is a free and open-source software product that performs hardware virtualization. You can run QEMU on the Cisco UCS server with KVM installed. The recommended version of QEMU for the Cisco IOS XRv Router reference platform is version 1.0.

Supported KVM-QEMU Features and Operations

This table lists KVM-QEMU features and operations that are supported and non-supported on the Cisco IOS XRv Router.

Table 2 Supported KVM-QEMU features and operations

Supported	Non-supported
Power on/off	Suspend/Resume
E1000 NICs	Snapshots
VirtIO NICs	Cloning

Hypervisor Limitations

The following are hypervisor limitations for the Cisco IOS XRv Router:

• The Cisco IOS XRv Router supports a maximum transmission unit (MTU) range of 1500 to 9216 bytes. However, the maximum MTU supported on your hypervisor version may be lower. The MTU value configured on any interface on the Cisco IOS XRv Router should not exceed the maximum MTU value supported on the hypervisor.
• The Cisco IOS XRv Router is aware of the emulated virtual NICs (VirtIO and E1000) provided to it by the hypervisor, but is unaware of the underlying physical NICs on the host. This has various implications, including:
  • The Cisco IOS XRv Router interfaces default to 1 GB bandwidth, irrespective of the hypervisor's physical NIC(s) bandwidth. The routing protocols (OSPF and EIGRP) use the Cisco IOS XRv Router interface bandwidth values for calculating the costs, not the physical NIC bandwidth.
  • If the physical NIC on the host goes down, this state change may not necessarily propagate to the virtual NICs in the Cisco IOS XRv Router, which may remain in an up/up state. This behavior is expected.