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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.
Regardless of hypervisor, all Cisco IOS XRv Router virtual machines must meet the following requirements:
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. |
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) |
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. |
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.
VMware supports various features and operations that allow you to manage your virtual applications and perform operations.
For more information about VMware features and operations, see the VMware Documentation.
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.
This table lists KVM-QEMU features and operations that are supported and non-supported on the Cisco IOS XRv Router.
Supported | Non-supported |
---|---|
Power on/off |
Suspend/Resume |
E1000 NICs |
Snapshots |
VirtIO NICs |
Cloning |