DNA Center ESXI Installation Guide

Before you begin:
As of Feb/02/2019 DNA center Esxi is not supported by Cisco. This most likely due to the hardware requirements when it comes to CPU/RAM & SSD Storage. That being this document is meant for training and lab purposes, obviously this is not something you’d want to run in production.

VMware Host Specs:

HP ProLiant G9
2 X CPU E5-2697 v3 @ 2.60GHz
320 GB RAM (196 GB minimum)
4 X SSD Samsung Enterprise Drive

As you may have noticed, the hardware is key to get DNA to work, cheap hardware and/or workstation setup will simply fail. I’ve had to go through a lot of different hardware configuration before I landed on a setup that can get DNA fully functional, keeping in mind that I did have a Cisco DNA Center hardware in the lab which allowed me to investigate.

Cisco DNA Center CIMC Setup:

The most important aspect when preparing your virtual machine is your disk partitioning and how you present it to the VM. The real DNA Center appliance comes equipped with 3 virtual disks VD-0 ,VD-1 and VD-2. This configuration is clearly revealed in the CIMC:

DNA Center VM requirements:

First make sure you are running Esxi 6.5 or later, I’ve tried earlier versions with 0% success rate. You’ll need to present your VM with 3 Virtual disks, fortunately you don’t need to Mimic the numbers above. A lower storage size will pass as long as you use SSD drives.

ESXI Host Storage Setup:

In my case I used 3 separate SSD drives, do not use small SSD drive and run RAID-0 to save on cost, again installation will fail , save the hustle.

DNA Center Virtual Machine Configuration:

Under Hard Disk “Click the X do Delete since we’ll be adding it later”.

Adjusting DNA Center VMware Settings:

Let’s go ahead click on settings so we can go through the Storage requirements. Storage is crucial step to get the setup complete, if you don’t follow my instructions carefully installation might succeed but as soon  as DNA begin to push packages , it will fail.

DNA Center Virtual Machine Network config:

For lab purposed I’ve included 2 NICS, you may add as many as you want but I recommend a minimum of 2.

DNA Center Virtual Machine CD Boot:

This one is fairly obvious, upload DNA Center ISO to your Data Store and attach it to CD/DVD Drive 1.

This is it ! I’m sorry the RAM/CPU numbers you’re seeing might appeal disturbing “Viewers discretion is advised” but the truth is DNA requires a lot of horse power. There’s a good reason Cisco does not support VM environment because most likely Admins will give the VM lower specs which will cause DNA not to perform. Cisco makes it clear that DNA Center does not like it’s resources to be shared, this is an entity that will control your entire CAMPUS FABRIC, you go cheap on hardware your campus will pay the price.

Begin the installation:
For this part I recommend you watch my YouTube tutorial

Published: 19-02-04