Special Considerations for VMware Virtual Edge deployment

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:
        • KVM - Activate SR-IOV on KVM
        • VMware - Enable SR-IOV on VMware
    • 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.