Catalyst Center on ESXi is intended for enterprise environments, such as manufacturing or education, where a large-scale requirement is present within a single physical environment.

The following requirements must be met in order to successfully deploy a Catalyst Center on ESXi virtual appliance. For performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere, see:

• VMware vSphere Client 7.0: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 7.0 (PDF)

• VMware vSphere Client 8.0: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 8.0 (PDF)

Table 1. Virtual Machine Minimum Requirements

Feature	Description
Virtualization platform and hypervisor	VMware vSphere (which includes ESXi and vCenter Server) 7.0.x or later, including all patches
Processors	Intel 2.1-GHz and above CPU 32 vCPUs with 64-GHz reservation must be dedicated to the VM
Memory	256-GB DRAM with 256-GB reservation must be dedicated to the VM
Storage	3-TB solid-state drive (SSD) If you plan to create backups of your virtual appliance, also reserve additional datastore space. For information, see "Backup Server Requirements" in the Cisco Catalyst Center on ESXi Administrator Guide.
IO Bandwidth	180 MB/sec
IOPS	2000-2500
Latency	Catalyst Center on ESXi to network device connectivity: 200 ms

Catalyst Center on ESXi has the following limitations and restrictions:

• In 2.3.7.6, the API rate limit policies that are documented in the official API documentation aren’t enforced. As a result, users might exceed the recommended API request limits without being automatically throttled or blocked by the system with an error response 429.

  While exceeding the API rate limits is not recommended, it is unlikely to cause immediate service disruption or security vulnerabilities. However, excessive API usage could lead to:

  • Performance degradation: High API request volumes could impact the overall performance of the Catalyst Center platform, potentially causing slower response times or temporary unavailability.

  • Resource contention: Increased API activity could consume additional system resources, affecting other platform functions or user experiences.

  • Unexpected behavior: In some cases, exceeding the API rate limits could trigger unexpected platform behavior or errors.

  To ensure optimal platform performance and stability, we recommend that you adhere to the documented API rate limit policies.

• For Group-Based Policy Analytics, the summary for the 24-hour and 12-hour Sankey charts isn't available in Catalyst Center on ESXi.

• Unlike the Catalyst Center platform, you cannot connect VMs to create three-node clusters. To achieve high availability, you need to use VMware vSphere. For more information, see the "High Availability" section in the Cisco Catalyst Center on ESXi Administrator Guide.

• Catalyst Center on ESXi does not support the following VMware vSphere features:

  • Fault tolerance

  • Suspending and resuming VMs

  • Cloning VMs

  • Snapshot (as backup)

• With Catalyst Center on ESXi, application telemetry is not supported for Cisco Catalyst 9500 Series Switches.

• To configure the Management interface and the Enterprise interface, manually create a virtual machine using the VMware vSphere UI and then configure both interfaces using either the Maglev Configuration wizard or the Install Configuration wizard. For more information, see the "Deploy a Virtual Appliance" section in the Cisco Catalyst Center on ESXi Deployment Guide.

Multiple Catalyst Center allows you to define a single global set of virtual networks for software-defined access across multiple Catalyst Center clusters integrated with a single Cisco ISE system. This Multiple Catalyst Center functionality is a Limited Availability offering in Catalyst Center on ESXi.

To facilitate global administration of Cisco SD-Access across multiple Catalyst Center clusters with a consistent set of virtual networks, the Multiple Catalyst Center feature leverages the existing secure connection with Cisco ISE to propagate virtual networks, Security Group Tags (SGTs), access contracts, and Group-Based Access Control (GBAC) Policy from one cluster to another cluster, all integrated with the same Cisco ISE deployment. Cisco ISE takes the information learned from one cluster (the Author node) and propagates it to the other clusters (Reader nodes).

Because there are significant caveats for the Multiple Catalyst Center functionality, the Cisco SD-Access Design Council reviews the requests and provides guidance for use of the Multiple Catalyst Center to participants in the Limited Availability program.

Contact your account team to submit a request to the Cisco SD-Access Design Council to participate in the Limited Availability program.

Customers who are using Cisco ISE Version 3.1 or earlier must request and install the Limited Availability package before enabling Multiple Catalyst Center.

Note	After this functionality is enabled, it can be disabled only by deleting Cisco ISE. In addition, if this functionality is enabled, because pxGrid is a required component of the solution, pxGrid cannot be disabled subsequently.

For information about how to deploy Catalyst Center in a VMware vSphere environment, see the Cisco Catalyst Center on ESXi Deployment Guide. The guide also covers configurations we recommend you make before you use the product.