Can a properly sized VM substitute for the dedicated Gen 2 Prime Appliance?

[Muhammed Adnan]

Hello Experts,

I have a project requirement wherein the scale ability is the major concern. We have a limitation that we would not be able to have dedicated server for Prime and VM is the only option

Can we have the VM provisioning with same hardware specifications reflecting for Gen 3 appliance will help in acheiving the same scalability as that of Gen 3 appliance?

[patoberli]

It probably will not be officially supported. Also the virtualization will produce some overhead, which isn't the case with the physical servers.

In any case, if you size for Professional and maybe add some more CPU cores and RAM, you should probably be fine. Also the max numbers you see there are not coded into the product and hard limits, it's just that Cisco doesn't guarantee more than that and they probably will not offer scaling support if the product is to slow.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/net_mgmt/prime/infrastructure/3-5/quickstart/guide/bk_Cisco_Prime_Infrastructure_3_5_0_Quick_Start_Guide.html#con_1070036

Which of those limits do you expect to exceed?

[Muhammed Adnan]

Thanks Patoberli for the response. Does is mean that if I scale my VM for 10 Cores/ 20 Threads and 64 GB Ram then I would be able to attain the scalability of a GEN-2 appliance? The limit that we foresee to exceed is wireless clients going upto 180,000.

[patoberli]

I think, as long as you don't enable all the other features (Syslog is a resource hog) it should work. There is also a possibility to use several prime servers. You can monitor the load, if everything works as expected, then you should be good to go.

[Rasika Nayanajith]

Here is the minimum server spec for VM. Go with minimum "Professional" specs

If scaling numbers does not meet your requirement then, may need to consider multiple Prime Servers with split load.

HTH

Rasika

*** Pls rate all useful responses ***

[Muhammed Adnan]

Thanks Rasika for your response.

As per VM spec requirement from deployment guide for professional installation, we would require only 16 vCPUs and 24 GB ram. From my experience from the past, this are very mild requirement to satisfy the scale-ability requirement (150,000 Wireless Clients) as depicted from the professional installation over VM.

Thus I would want to consider higher specification in VM sizing ie 20 vCPUs and 64 GB ram, to match with the specification of Gen-2 Appliance.

My concern is will using 20 vCPUs and 64 GB ram in VM sizing is equivalent to having a Gen-2 Appliance wherein even more higher scale-ability is promised (200,000 Wireless Clients)?

[patoberli]

This information is unknown and not supported. So you are welcome to try it, but you can't expect to get support if you run into performance issues.

[Muhammed Adnan]

Thanks Patoberli for the response.

So I believe there are two things that could be derived from our understandings so far:

1. We may or may not get the advantage if we are considering higher VM sizing (20 vCPUs and 64 GB ram) then what is stated in deployment guide (16 vCPUs and 24 GB ram) for professional installation of Prime over VM.

2. Even though the advantage in higher VM sizing is not clear, but at the same time there are no downside if one is considering higher VM sizing for professional installation of Prime over VM.

[patoberli]

This is correct.

One thing to note, the disk latency / IOPS is probably the number one issue if you enable a lot of traps and syslog message. Make sure you are using pure SSD based storage.