Ironport ESA vs vESA

[aslakgaaserud]

Hi,

We are about to evaluate the Ironport vESA as our email proxy, and I would like to know if there are any differences between a virtual ESA and an ESA appliance?

I heard that to achieve full functionality the virtual ESA needs to run on specialized Cisco hardware, is this true?

Thanks and best regards,

Aslak

[Ken Stieers]

no. full functionality is there on whatever hardware. The support docs say something about "best effort" support on non-Cisco servers but that's Cisco doing a CYA.

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPad App

[Robert Sherwin · Accepted solution]

By "specialized Cisco hardware" - that would be UCS...

Cisco UCS servers (blade or rack-mounted) are the only supported hardware platform for the virtual appliance.

The only supported virtualization hypervisors are the following VMWare ESXi versions:

Any other hardware platform or VMware hypervisor will be supported on a “Best Effort” basis: we will try to help you, but it may not be possible to reproduce all problems, and we cannot guarantee a solution. No other virtualization hypervisor is supported.

Full details:

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/security/content_security/virtual_appliances/Cisco_Content_Security_Virtual_Appliance_Install_Guide.pdf

Hope this helps!

-Robert

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