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Should I go with a physical appliance or a VM for Cisco Prime Infrastructure?

Brett
Level 1
Level 1

Currently I have a VM with Cisco Prime infrastructure 3.1.6 with 20 CPUs and 24 GB RAM.  I am having a lot of performance problems with the application and am wondering if I should move to a physical appliance?  I am looking at a physical appliance gen 2.  Does anyone see a performance difference between a VM and a physical appliance?

8 Replies 8

There isnt any difference between a VM and a physical. If you have followed the specs listed in the release notes, you should be fine. I dont remember the script that is used to check the disk IO speed. If you open a TAC case they should be able to give you one. The Disk IO speed should be greater than a specified number.

Did you try to do a fresh install of PI and restore maps from backup and see if that resolved the performance issue you had? 

The CLI command to test disk I/O performance on a Prime appliance is:

#ncs run test iops

Recommended I/O is around 320 MB/s

Hope this helps

Ours is running right around 250 - 260 MB/s.  Would this cause the application to hang in any way?

Brett, you will see issues with those numbers.

I haven't yet, I'm trying to avoid it as much as possible to see if there is a VM issue or an application issue.  My fear is that if I do this that it might creep up again without a solvable solution.

Marvin Rhoads
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

I would add that a VM is much easier to migrate across releases if/when you want to build a new one and restore and old configuration.

Most enterprises also have some sort of VM infrastructure snapshot scheme or other enterprise backup solution that gets you out of managing Prime appliance backups.

The only advantages I have seen of a physical appliances are where the customer either does not have a VMware ESXi environment (or one with adequate resources) or the team running Prime Infrastructure does not have a good working relationship with the team running the virtualization systems. (layer 8 problem)

I am having a lot of performance problems with the application

Can you explain what you mean by this?

At times Prime is running just fine and at other times it will hang 20-30 seconds at a time where you are unable to click/type anything in the GUI.  Once it starts doing this it will continue to hang off and on for a few minutes up to a few hours.  CPU usage is at an acceptable level during those times, and Memory is as well.

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