Cisco Cisco Security Manager 4.11 Guía De Instalación

Security Manager supports running in VMware ESXi 5.1U2 and VMware ESXi versions up to ESXi 6.0. 
Other VMware environments such as VMware Server and VMware Workstation are not supported. 

You can use any server operating system supported by Security Manager as guest operating system for 
VMware. The VMware qualification effort involved running the same set of performance and durability 
tests that are performed on Security Manager running on a regular non-virtualized server. Test results 
have shown that running Security Manager in VMware ESX Server 4.0 introduces a modest amount of 
application performance degradation which varies based on the size of the reference network involved 
and the specific test case. Deployment of Security Manager in VMware environment is only suitable for 
smaller size of network. 

One area where the performance degradation was usually large was the case of performing a deployment 
to large number of PIX or ASA devices or a device with large number of rules (on the order of 5 to 50 
thousands rules). In this case the deployment took much longer than acceptable speed. For VMware 
performance best practices you should refer to the following document: 

However, you should avoid tuning any of the advanced VMware parameters, as the default values or 
settings are generally optimal. 

It is also recommended to use one of the later generation servers with a processor that includes 
technology specifically designed to improve the efficiency of virtualization. For example, good results 
were obtained when testing Security Manager running in VMware ESX Server 4.0 on an Intel® Xeon® 
X5500 series Quad-core processor, which includes Intel® Virtualization Technology (IVT). AMD offers 
64-bit x86 architecture processors with virtualization extensions, which they refer to as AMD 
Virtualization (AMD-V). 

For virtual machine hardware and software requirements, refer to 

, 

You can deploy Security Manager in a high-availability or disaster recovery configuration to 
significantly improve application availability and survivability in the event of a server, storage, network, 
or site failure. These deployment options are covered in detail in the applicable Security Manager high 
availability documentation 
(

A single CSM license is enough to use CSM in VMware HA/DR scenario.

For detailed instructions on Security Manager installation, refer to the 

.