• Hardware independence: The Cisco Catalyst 8000V router uses the benefits of virtualization in the cloud to provide hardware independence. Since the Cisco Catalyst 8000V runs on a virtual machine, you can use this router on any x86 hardware that the virtualization platform supports.

• Sharing of resources: The resources used by Cisco Catalyst 8000V are managed by the hypervisor, and these resources can be shared among the VMs. You can regulate the amount of hardware resources that the VM server allocates to a specific VM. You can reallocate resources to another VM on the server.

• Flexibility in deployment: You can easily move a VM from one server to another. Thus, you can move a Cisco Catalyst 8000V instance from a server in one physical location to a server in another physical location without moving any hardware resources.

• Enhanced software security - Secure Object Store: In Cisco Catalyst 8000V, storage partitions for NVRAM, licensing, and other data are created as Object stores. The individual Object stores are encrypted to ensure data security, and this product is Cisco Secure Development lifecycle (CSDL) compliant. Further, Cisco Catalyst 8000V supports a 16G disk profile.

The Cisco Catalyst 8000V router interfaces perform the same functionality as those on hardware-based Cisco routers. The Cisco Catalyst 8000V interfaces function as follows:

• The interfaces are logically named as the Gigabit Ethernet (GE) interfaces.

• The available interface numbering depends on the Cisco Catalyst 8000V version.

When you first boot the device, the Cisco Catalyst 8000V router interfaces are mapped to the vNIC interfaces on the VM based on the vNIC enumeration to the Cisco Catalyst 8000V. On subsequent boot, the Cisco Catalyst 8000V router interfaces are mapped to the vNIC MAC addresses.

For more information, see Mapping the Cisco Catalyst 8000V Network Interfaces to the VM Network Interfaces.

Cisco Catalyst 8000V is a virtual router that runs on Cisco IOS XE and Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN. This guide provides the overview, installation, and configuration information for Cisco Catalyst 8000V on Cisco IOS XE.

You can configure and manage Cisco Catalyst 8000V by:

• Provisioning a serial port in the VM to connect and access the Cisco IOS XE CLI commands.

  Note	You can use a serial port to manage a Cisco Catalyst 8000V VM only if the underlying hypervisor supports associating a serial port with a VM. See your hypervisor documentation for more details.

• Using the remote SSH/Telnet to access the Cisco IOS XE CLI commands.

  Note

  By default, Telnet is disabled for security reasons. SSH is disabled in an on-prem deployment. Although SSH is preferred for remote user management, you must manually enable SSH in an on-prem deployment. In cloud deployments, SSH is enabled by default. To access SSH, ensure that your cloud security settings allow SSH connectivity for both inbound and outbound traffic.

The software for Cisco Catalyst 8000V uses the standard Cisco IOS XE CLI commands and conventions. The commands are not case sensitive, and you can abbreviate the commands and parameters if the abbreviations contain enough letters to be different from any other currently available commands or parameters. To access all the features of Cisco IOS XE CLI and how to use them, see the Configuration Fundamentals Configuration Guide.