DNA Center virtual

[adminko]

Hi

Is it possible to let the DNA Center run on hypervisors like Hyper-V or ESX?

[prasad.gsmc]

APIC for DC runs on virtual machine. Not able to digest the logic of not having virtual option as it was the case with APIC-EM. by restricting to hardware the option of hosting the DNA-C in a cloud is gone.

A new product like this could have made it look like a Gen X solution with a cloud option. The complementing component such as the ISE is still running on VM (or can).

get real by getting virtual :-)

with regards,

Prasad

[sean.moore]

Has there been any recent updates to this? Can we run on a 3rd party VM yet?

[Tomas de Leon]

There is no update or roadmap information for the Cisco DNA Center Virtualization.  At this time, the Cisco DNA Center will only be supported on a hardware appliance.

Regards

T.

[amordeaa]

Looks like it's possible to install DNA Center on VMware ESXI but as mentioned and stressed out in the video, "True horse power is needed" in terms of CPU & RAM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64gTr1VBIeY

[karco]

This is good info, thank you!  How do I order/obtain the DNAC ISO, is that something that can be ordered directly?

[jedolphi]

Hello,

Please observe that the linked YouTube video has not been published by Cisco. As of this moment (5/Feb/2019) Cisco does not support installation of DNA Centre as ESXi VM. The ISO is available only to customers that need to rebuild their physical Cisco DNA Center appliance. TAC will provide a special access URL to the ISO if during troubleshooting it is determined that a customer's Cisco DNA Center needs to be re-imaged.

Regarding a lab VM, it is well understood that there is a strong demand in the field for such a thing. If you require a lab VM then please open a dialogue with your sales team to discuss your requirements and possible immediate and future options.

Best regards, Jerome

[Tomas de Leon]

For the Cisco Internal Folks, please use the internal Cisco DNA Webex Team Spaces and you will find answers to this question that could be helpful for internal deployments and labs.

Remember this is a public community, and we need to keep discussions to what is officially supported.  This will avoid many Services, Support, and Sales issues with potential Cisco DNA Customers.

As mentioned earlier, the Cisco DNA Center is a hardware appliance and is only supported (at this time) as such. The Cisco DNAC .ISO image can be obtained for Recovery purposes only and requires a Cisco TAC Case so the TAC engineer can post the image with special file access.

Regards

T.

[ThorstenEB]

Chris, my recommendation for evaluating Cisco DNA Center would be to work closely with your partner and Cisco account team. There are "canned demos" available. Beyond that, for evaluation in your environment, there is FREE-DNAC-OFFER, and SDA-WW-LABKIT. The promotional offer is usually time-limited.

[torabian28]

Hi Tomas,

If the DNA-C is available in hardware form only, is it possible to provide multi DC reslilience? From what I can gather, the only form of resilience appears to be using 3 node clustering on the same (L2) network. I don't see any mention of L3 sync capabilities

[stamperbrian]

This continues to blow my mind.  I'm not sure how Cisco wants to make this the next big thing but doesn't give the people who will have to deploy and use it the option to learn it.  Don't give me the "canned demos" stuff.  That's not how the engineers that work on this stuff learn.  We learn in our own labs between the hours of 10PM and 3AM whilst drinking heavily.  To not so much as even have an "eval" download available that will just boot up and support 2/3 switches and a wireless controller for 60 days so we can learn the product and get familiar with it.  You want the product to succeed there is a huge advantage in having all those post sales resources both internally and at partners who are already in that customers environment doing other work to say yes, I've seen it, yes I know it, and yes its awesome.  Right now all I can say is no, I haven't seen it and Cisco hasn't given me the ability to learn it.  Its now become part of almost every new CCIE track as well...how is anyone supposed to learn this product.  1 iso/vm image that supports a limited number of devices for 60 days.  Honestly don't even care if its slow so long as I can beat it up a little bit. 

[sean.moore]

I second this.

[ThorstenEB]

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@stamperbrian wrote:

 I'm not sure how Cisco wants to make this the next big thing but doesn't give the people who will have to deploy and use it the option to learn it.

Speaking as a System Architect, I hear you. I certainly want my partners and customers to be comfortable with CDNAC.

I don't have a perfect solution. I can throw out a few options.

dCloud. Search for "DNA Sandbox". While the focus is on programmability and Python, this does include a CDNAC instance. It's not your own lab, it doesn't have wireless, and, it may get you started.

If you work for a customer: One free CDNAC appliance with an EN EA. Perfect for a lab unit.

SDA-WW-LABKIT. One CDNAC appliance, controller, couple APs, a sensor, optional a few Cat9k switches. Cisco account teams can discount this quite deeply because it's lab gear.

Cisco DNA Center Cloud, briefly mentioned here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm7w57DWt_c&feature=youtu.be . This isn't available yet. Since we now have mentions of it on Youtube, I expect it can't be too too far away.

[Bawsk]

They better be working on a virtual edition. They couldn't stop support for Prime Infrastructure(Whenvever that happens) without having another virtualized replacement, could they?

Just give me the assurance functions and I'm good..

[Farhan Mohamed]

As of now DNAC is not supported or cannot be installed in form for ESXi VM or Hyper-V. This is something cisco is planning on later half of this FY. But nothing is official yet, But what i can think of this you can still control or play around in an architrecture which deals with ESX environments. What i mean by that is, Hyperflex is cisco own which runs on hypervisors you name a flavor, which can again be integrated with ACI. Now ACI is SDN for DC, and DNAC is SDN for enterprise networking, But to run complete scenario, both EN and DC should work together, so you can integrate both forms to run together, I am not sure if it solves your purpose, But in future, cimplications can be avoided and will be helpful and certain workloads can be handled from one single interface.

In future, surely some release will make DNAC flexible to run as VM, but as there is nothing official i cannot comment on it as of now.