IronPort Virtualization

[Nirender Aggarwal]

I do not see much out there about virtualization.  For those who have set up virtuals on ESX do you have any best practices for the compute requirements: storage, memory, cpu and i/o.  We are looking at adding some virtual appliance due to increased volume along side our C670 physicals for now.

Any input would be much appreciated.

Teddy

[Ken Stieers]

Its all covered in this document:

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

[marc.luescherFRE]

Hi there,

a few additional comments about virtualisation of Ironports :

a) the VMware images are the top of our list in terms of CPU. RAM and IO on our ESX hosts. Dont underestimate this when going virtual.

b) the deployment image is preset to a given number of vCPU, RAm and disk. dont try to change this.

c) Vmotion is supported but you might run into a condition where the incoming and outgoing network connectivity is stalled and you can only access via vSphere Console. In that case you will need to restart the appliance to gain connectivity again.

d) when clustering be carefull about adding a virtual appliance to an existing cluster of hardware appliances. Some of the automated update links like AV, patterns etc for virtual update services are different and will be overwritten with the ones from your hardware devices. Ran into this a few times. Needs then to be fixed by hand.

e) we are currently running 12 virtual V600 and I think we can do about 14 messages a second when all services are active per appliance.

Hope that helps.

Marc