The recommended hardware and software settings are intended to ensure optimum SBC SWe stability and performance. If the recommended settings are not used, the SBC SWe system may not behave as expected.
In this section:
This section describes SBC SWe hardware and software requirements and recommendations.
To install and configure SBC SWe, make sure the Virtual Machine (VM) host meets the following recommended hardware, server platform and software requirements.
The SBC SWe software only runs on platforms using Intel processors. Platforms using AMD processors are not supported. The following table lists the server hardware requirements: Intel Xeon processors (Nehalem micro-architecture or above) with 6 cores and above (processors should support hyper threading). Ribbon recommends using Westmere (or newer) processors for better SRTP performance. These processors have the AES-NI instruction set for performing cryptographic operations in hardware. The supported CPU Family number is 6 and CPU Model number must be newer than 26. Refer to the Intel Architecture and Processor Identification document for more information. ESXi 6.5 and later releases require approximately 2 physical cores to be set aside for hypervisor functionality. The number of VMs which can be hosted on a server must be planned for accordingly. Minimum 4 NICs, if physical NIC redundancy is not required. Make sure NICs have multi-queue support which enhances network performance by allowing RX and TX queues to scale with the number of CPUs on multi-processor systems. Intel I350, x540, x550, x710 and 82599, Mellanox Connect - 4x, and Mellanox Connect - 5x. Number of ports allowed: Configuration Requirement Processor RAM Minimum 24 GB Hard Disk Minimum 500 GB Network Interface Cards (NICs) Ports
Using older versions of ESXi can trigger a VM instance shutdown. To prevent this from occurring, you must upgrade the VMware ESXi -- refer to the End of General Support column on https://lifecycle.vmware.com/#/ for supported versions. The following are the SBC SWe requirements for VMware ESXi environments: * The version must be supported. See the End of General Support column at https://lifecycle.vmware.com/#/ for supported versions. The VMware Enterprise Plus license is required for SR-IOV.VMware ESXi Requirements