In this section:
This section describes SBC SWe hardware and software requirements and recommendations.
To install and configure the SBC SWe, make sure the Virtual Machine (VM) host meets the following recommended hardware, server platform and software requirements.
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.
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). Westmere (or newer) processors are recommended 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 Intel Architecture and Processor Identification document for more information. ESXi 6.5 and later releases requires approximately 2 physical cores to be set aside for hypervisor functionality. Number of VMs which can be hosted on a server needs to be planned accordingly. Otherwise, 8 NICs (preferably with SR-IOV capability to support future SWe optimizations). Make sure NIC has multi-queue support which enhances network performance by allowing RX and TX queues to scale with the number of CPUs on multi-processor systems. Only Intel I350 Ethernet adapter is supported for configuring as VMDirectPath I/O pass-through device. Number of ports allowed: The SBC SWe software only runs on platforms using Intel processors. Platforms using AMD processors are not supported. Configuration Requirement Processor RAM Minimum 24 GB Hard Disk Minimum 500 GB Network Interface Cards (NICs) Ports
Sonus recommends the following BIOS settings for optimum performance:
For example, the BIOS settings are shown below for HP DL 380p Gen8 servers. For BIOS settings of other servers, refer to the respective vendor website.
The following are the VMware ESXi and SBC SWe software requirements: The VMware Standard License will be sufficient for SWe SBC unless the PKT interfaces for SBC SWe needs to be configured in Direct IO Pass-through mode. In that case, the Enterprise Plus version of VMware ESXi software is required.SBC SWe for VMware – Software Requirements
VMware ESXi Requirements
For more information, refer to Downloading SBC SWe Installation Files from SalesForce Portal.
Following are recommended VMware ESXi and SBC SWe virtual machine (VM) configurations.
Following are recommended VMware ESXi configurations:
Use virtual hardware version 8 and above while creating new VMs (available starting ESXi 5.x). This provides additional capabilities to VMs such as supporting VM with up to 1 TB RAM, up to 32 vCPUs etc.
Use VMware vSphere client to configure the following ESXi host configuration parameters on the Advanced Settings page (see figure below) before installing the SBC SWe:
Settings | Recommended Configuration |
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vCPU | Minimum 4 vCPUs required. But In case where there are only four physical cores available, you must configure the VM with only 3 vCPUs. Any number of vCPUs may be configured depending upon the call capacity requirements.
Note
3 vCPUs configuration is supported only from SBC 4.2.4 release. Note
VMDirectPath mode is only supported for PKT ports for vCPUs >=4. Warning
In Direct I/O, if you want to notified with link detection failure using LinkMonitor, use a server with more than 4 vCPUs. Note
For detailed information on the VM configuration, refer to the section Creating a New SBC SWe VM Instance with VMXNET3 or Creating a New SBC SWe VM Instance with Direct IO Passthru based on the NIC type used. |
vRAM | Keep Resource Allocation setting marked as 'unlimited'. Reserve the memory based on call capacity and configuration requirements. Refer to SBC SWe Performance Metrics for supported call capacities with different configuration limits. |
Virtual Hard Disk | Set Hard Disk (virtual) size as 100 GB or more (based on requirements of retaining CDRs, logs, etc. for number of days)
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vNICs | Set number of virtual NICs as 4 (1-MGMT, 1-HA, 1-PKT0 and 1-PKT1).
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vSwitch settings |
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Make sure the Processors, ESXi version and VM configuration (vCPUs, vRAMs, Virtual Hard Disk, vNICs, and vSwitch Settings) must be identical for SBC SWe HA pair.
Make sure that the BIOS and ESXi settings and recommendations must not be changed once it is applied on the server.
On a server with a single 4 cores processor, ESXi 6.5 and above releases are not supported since there is not enough CPU available for launching 3 vCPUs SBC SWe VM after considering overhead required for ESXi.