Cisco DNA Center offers centralized, intuitive management that makes it fast and easy to design, provision, and apply policies across your network environment. The Cisco DNA Center user interface provides end-to-end network visibility and uses network insights to optimize network performance and deliver the best user and application experience.

Cisco DNA Center on ESXi offers the same centralized and intuitive management as the Cisco DNA Center platform. The main difference is that Cisco DNA Center on ESXi delivers this functionality in a virtual appliance (VA) form-factor.

Cisco DNA Center on ESXi supports all of the features that the Cisco DNA Center supports, except for the following features:

Unsupported Features

• Automation: Cisco Wide Area Bonjour application, Cisco vManage for SD-WAN, Cisco DNA Traffic Telemetry Appliance, Cisco Secure Network Analytics.

• Wireless: Cisco User Defined Network (UDN), Cisco Umbrella.

• Assurance: Sensor.

• System Workflows: Backup and Restore using VMware vSphere Client snapshot function, Backup and Restore from Cisco DNA Center hardware appliance to Cisco DNA Center on ESXi virtual appliance.

• Diagnostics Center: Validation Tool under System > System Health > Tools.

• Setting Page: Authentication API Encryption.

• Security Policy Access (SPA): Security Sensor in Endpoint Analytics and Group Based Policy Analytics (GBPA).

• Telemetry: VM- and host-level telemetry.

The Cisco DNA 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.

See the following tables for the minimum Cisco DNA Center on ESXi virtual machine requirements. For performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere Client 7.0, see Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 7.0 (PDF).

Table 3. Virtual Machine Minimum Requirements

Feature	Description
Virtualization platform and hypervisor	VMware vSphere (which includes ESXi and vCenter Server) 7.0.x, 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 DNA Center on ESXi Administrator Guide.
IO Bandwidth	180 MB/sec
IOPS	2000-2500
Latency	Cisco DNA Center on ESXi to network device connectivity: 200 ms

Cisco DNA Center on ESXi has the following limitations and restrictions:

• Unlike the Cisco DNA 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 DNA Center on ESXi Administrator Guide, "Configure System Settings" chapter.

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

  • Fault tolerance

  • Suspending and resuming VMs

  • Cloning VMs

  • Snapshot (as backup)

• With Cisco DNA 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 DNA Center on ESXi Deployment Guide.

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

To facilitate global administration of Cisco SD-Access across multiple Cisco DNA Center clusters with a consistent set of virtual networks, the Multiple Cisco DNA 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 Cisco DNA Center functionality, the Cisco SD-Access Design Council reviews the requests and provides guidance for use of the Multiple Cisco DNA 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 Cisco DNA 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 Cisco DNA Center Virtual Appliance in a VMware vSphere environment, see the Cisco DNA Center on ESXi Deployment Guide. The guide also covers configurations we recommend you make before you use the product.