Cisco Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance 11.5 White Paper

 

 

© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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There should minimally exist one management network common among all hosts, though it is 

recommended to have two 

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All hosts should have access to the same virtual machine networks and data stores 

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Virtual machines must be located on shared storage 

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Host certificate checking should be enabled 

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Hosts within a cluster must be either on IPv4 or IPv6, not a mix, or this can result in a network partition 

Details on vSphere HA requirements can be found here: 

Cisco Prime Collaboration Requirements 

There are no special requirements for Cisco Prime Collaboration to enable vSphere HA, nor is any configuration 

required on Cisco Prime Collaboration. 

General VMware requirements for Cisco Prime Collaboration can be found in the Quick Start Guides here: 

The Cisco Prime Collaboration Quick Start Guides include detailed virtual machine requirements for Cisco Prime 

Collaboration Assurance (including Analytics) and Cisco Prime Collaboration Provisioning. 

vSphere HA Configuration 

vSphere HA is configured clusterwide. It also comes with a number of options for further fine-tuning and control. 

Recommendations for Cisco Prime Collaboration are offered below. 

These options specify policies based on available cluster capacity when vSphere HA is enabled. For the Admission 

Control option, Cisco recommends Enabled. This will prevent new VMs from turning on in situations in which doing 

so will exceed the configured maximum host failover capacity, and it will help prevent overcommitment in the event 

of host failures. Once enabled, three Admission Control Policy options will help determine how much spare 

capacity is available in the event of host failures. 

The first option looks at spare capacity from the perspective of the number of host failures you want to withstand, 

given your hardware slot size (a metric that sizes your host based on the amount of RAM and CPU capacity). The 

second option allows you to choose manually the amount of spare RAM and CPU percentages. The third option 

allows you to specify failover hosts - 

essentially placing these hosts in maintenance mode until there’s a failure. 

The most conservative and safest approach is to size failover capacity to enable restarting of all machines (high 

enough to allow all machines to restart). If this cannot be done, then Cisco recommends an approach that allows 

for the maximum amount of spare capacity in your setup to tolerate failover. 

Within this area are two configurable items. 

The first is VM Restart Priority and the second is Host Isolation Response. You can configure these both at the 

cluster level by selecting from the drop-down boxes, or you can configure them individually by clicking the specific 

machine and changing the settings manually.