CSR1000v - vCUBE - Poor performance

[mmoulson1]

Hi all,

We are doing some lab testing with the CSR1000v running as CUBE for SIP.

However the performance is terrible! A single call works OK but as soon as we get to around 17 the quality drops off, the SSH session freezes up and I have to used the VMware console to get CLI access. The CPU on the CSR1000 reports low usage but I can see it spike in VMware but to around 80% not 100%. I am not running any debug so as not to impact performance.

I found this document:

https://www.ciscolive.com/c/dam/r/ciscolive/latam/docs/2018/pdf/BRKCOL-2125.pdf

And it talks about just installing on "no specialized hardware" and even the basic 1vCPU 2.5GB RAM can support 4 calls per second and 720 flow-thru session.

However I'm pretty sure 17 calls does not equal 720 session! And my VM is setup for 4vCPU and 8GB RAM.

Does anyone have any experience they can share? Or a reference to specific specification of server that works well?

[mmoulson1 · Accepted solution]

For anyone interested it was a license problem.

I had installed an IP base license which would give 10gig throughput and then used the 'license boot level ax'. This enabled the voice features. However after applying the boot command the throughput level had fallen back to the unlicensed 100 kb/s!

I removed the IP base license and installed an AX license, the throughput now shows 2500000 kb/s and we have tested over 200 concurrent calls without issue.

show platform hardware throughput level

The current throughput level is 2500000 kb/s - This is what's included with the AX license.