Prerequisites and Guidelines
Before you proceed with deploying the Nexus Dashboard cluster in VMware ESX, you must:
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Ensure that the ESX form factor supports your scale and services requirements.
Scale and services support and co-hosting vary based on the cluster form factor and the specific services you plan to deploy. You can use the Nexus Dashboard Capacity Planning tool to verify that the virtual form factor satisfies your deployment requirements.
Note
Some services (such as Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller) may require only a single ESX virtual node for one or more specific use cases. In that case, the capacity planning tool will indicate the requirement and you can simply skip the additional node deployment step in the following section.
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Review and complete the general prerequisites described in Deployment Overview and Requirements.
Note that this document describes how to initially deploy the base Nexus Dashboard cluster. If you want to expand an existing cluster with additional nodes (such as
worker
orstandby
), see the "Infrastructure Management" chapter of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard User Guide instead, which is available from the Nexus Dashboard UI or online at Cisco Nexus Dashboard User Guide -
Review and complete any additional prerequisites described in the Release Notes for the services you plan to deploy.
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When deploying in VMware ESX, you can deploy two types of nodes:
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Data Node—node profile designed for data-intensive applications, such Nexus Dashboard Insights
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App Node—node profile designed for non-data-intensive applications, such Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator
Note
If you plan to add worker nodes to your cluster:
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For NDFC, both the initial cluster and worker nodes can be App nodes.
Detailed scale information is available in the Verified Scalability Guide for Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller for your release.
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For all other services or co-hosting scenarios, the initial cluster must be deployed using Data nodes.
Ensure you have enough system resources:
Table 1. Deployment Requirements Nexus Dashboard Version
Data Node Requirements
App Node Requirements
Release 2.3.x
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VMware ESXi 7.0, 7.0.1, 7.0.2, 7.0.3
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VMware vCenter 7.0.1, 7.0.2 if deploying using vCenter
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Each VM requires the following:
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32 vCPUs with physical reservation of at least 2.2GHz
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128GB of RAM with physical reservation
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3TB SSD storage for the data volume and an additional 50GB for the system volume
Data
nodes must be deployed on storage with the following minimum performance requirements:-
The SSD must be attached to the data store directly or in JBOD mode if using a RAID Host Bus Adapter (HBA)
-
The SSDs must be optimized for
Mixed Use/Application
(notRead-Optimized)
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4K Random Read IOPS:
93000
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4K Random Write IOPS:
31000
-
-
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We recommend that each Nexus Dashboard node is deployed in a different ESXi server.
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VMware ESXi 7.0, 7.0.1, 7.0.2, 7.0.3
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VMware vCenter 7.0.1, 7.0.2 if deploying using vCenter
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Each VM requires the following:
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16 vCPUs with physical reservation of at least 2.2GHz
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64GB of RAM with physical reservation
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500GB HDD or SSD storage for the data volume and an additional 50GB for the system volume
Some services require
App
nodes to be deployed on faster SSD storage while other services support HDD. Check the Nexus Dashboard Capacity Planning tool to ensure that you use the correct type of storage.
-
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We recommend that each Nexus Dashboard node is deployed in a different ESXi server.
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After each node's VM is deployed, ensure that the VMware Tools' periodic time synchronization is disabled as described in the deployment procedure in the next section.
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VMware vMotion is not supported for Nexus Dashboard cluster nodes.
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VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is not supported for Nexus Dashboard cluster nodes.
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Because Nexus Dashboard is a platform infrastructure, it is not possible to bring down all services.
In other words, if you want to take a snapshot of the virtual machine (such as for debugging purposes), the snapshot must have all Nexus Dashboard services running.
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You can choose to deploy the nodes directly in ESXi or using vCenter.
If you want to deploy using vCenter, following the steps described in Deploying Nexus Dashboard Using VMware vCenter.
If you want to deploy directly in ESXi, following the steps described in Deploying Nexus Dashboard Directly in VMware ESXi.