Virtual appliance node requirements

You can install Security Engine on virtual appliances with these hardware requirements. Also be aware of some limitations.

Component Requirement
CPU Intel® processors based on Westmere microarchitecture or newer.
Memory Minimum 4 GB of RAM
Virtual disk space Minimum 8 GB
Hypervisor One of the following:
  • VMware ESXi 7.0 or 8.0
  • KVM with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 or 9.x
  • (Engine with Layer 3 Interfaces only) Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016 with an Intel 64-bit processor
Interfaces
  • At least one virtual network interface for the Security Engine with Layer 3 Interfaces
  • Three virtual network interfaces for Engines with Layer 2 Interfaces

The following network interface card drivers are recommended:

  • VMware ESXi platform — vmxnet3.
  • KVM platform — virtio_net.

When Security Engine is run as a virtual appliance node, these limitations apply:

  • Only Packet Dispatching CVI mode is supported.
  • Only standby clustering mode is supported.
  • Heartbeat requires a dedicated non-VLAN-tagged interface.

When Security Engine is run as a virtual appliance node in the Engines with Layer 2 Interfaces, clustering is not supported.