Cisco DNAC lab

[Maurice Ball]

I would like to setup a DNAC cluster lab for testing and learning. Is it possible to run the DNAC nodes on less then the VMware recommended system requirements?

[Torbjørn]

I believe you will run into issues if your server doesn't have the required number of CPU threads and memory for the appliance. This is due to the fact that VMware doesn't allow assigning more vCPUs(threads) and memory per VM than available to the host(resources for a single VM can't exceed host resources). If your server has enough CPU cores/threads and memory for the appliance requirements it shouldn't be an issue if you oversubscribe them(total vCPU and memory across VMs can exceed host resources).

The last time I had a look at how DNAC services works all Kubernetes pods used resource requests to allocate/reserve resources. This dictates the minimum requirements for CPU and memory resources for all services to be able to start. Keep in mind that the last time I did a "DNAC service deepdive" was on 1.3 and this might have changed.

[Maurice Ball]

Ok, thanks for the feedback. 

[Torbjørn · Accepted solution]

If you are comfortable in AWS it can be a good alternative is to run a DNAC-VA there for labbing alongside EVE-ng/CML-PE on an EC2 baremetal instance. The DNAC-VA on AWS is surprisingly cheap at around $1.808/hr.