Describes the special considerations for VMware Virtual Edge deployment.

  • The SD-WAN Edge is a latency-sensitive application. Refer to the VMware documentation to adjust the Virtual Machine (VM) as a latency-sensitive application.
  • Recommended Host settings:
    • BIOS settings to achieve highest performance:
      • CPUs at 2.0 GHz or higher
      • Enable Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT)
      • Deactivate Hyper-threading
      • Virtual Edge supports paravirtualized vNIC VMXNET 3 and passthrough vNIC SR-IOV:
        • When using VMXNET3, deactivate SR-IOV on host BIOS and ESXi
        • When using SR-IOV, enable SR-IOV on host BIOS and ESXi
        • To enable SR-IOV on VMware and KVM, see:
      • Deactivate power savings on CPU BIOS for maximum performance
      • Activate CPU turbo
      • CPU must support the AES-NI, SSSE3, SSE4, RDTSC, RDSEED, RDRAND instruction sets
      • Recommend reserving 2 cores for Hypervisor workloads

        For example, for a 10-core CPU system, recommend running one 8-core virtual edge or two 4-core virtual edge and reserve 2 cores for Hypervisor processes.

    • For a dual socket host system, make sure the hypervisor is assigning network adapters, memory and CPU resources that are within the same socket (NUMA) boundary as the vCPUs assigned.
  • Recommended VM settings:
    • CPU should be set to '100% reserved'
    • CPU shares should be set to High
    • Memory should be set to ‘100% reserved’
    • Latency sensitivity should be set to High
  • The default username for the SD-WAN Edge SSH console is root.