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Deploy VAs in Nutanix

Deploy Cisco Secure Access Virtual Appliances in Nutanix.

Note: You must deploy at least two Virtual Appliances (VAs) in a Secure Access Site. It is critical that these VAs are not cloned or copied in any way. Configure and set up each VA manually.

Table of Contents

Prerequisites

  • Full Admin user role. For more information, see Manage Accounts.
  • For information about the network requirements for deploying VAs, see Prerequisites for Virtual Appliances.
  • Virtual Appliance deployments are supported on the current LTS version of Nutanix AHV only.

(Optional) Configure Authentication for the Virtual Appliances

Before you can download the Virtual Appliance image in Secure Access, you must configure your Secure Access API keys for the Virtual Appliances in your organization. For more information, see Configure Authentication for Virtual Appliances.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to Connectors > DNS Forwarders and click Download Components.

  2. Click Download for VA for hyper-V.

Secure Access generates and downloads to your computer a .tar file unique to your deployment.
This tar file includes:

  • a .zip file containing the virtual hard disks that need to be deployed on Nutanix
  • a signature file
  • a Cisco public certificate to validate the signature
  • a readme file
  1. Extract the contents of the tar file.
    To verify the integrity of the downloaded file, validate the signature by following the instructions provided in the readme file. When successful, a message saying Verified OK will appear.
    Run: 
    tar –xvf <tar filename> -C <Destination folder>
  2. Extract the downloaded zip file.
    You will find two folders—Virtual Hard Disks and Virtual Machines—and a config file. Navigate to the Virtual Hard Disks folder and find the forwarder-va.vhd and dynamic.vhd files.
  3. Log into the Nutanix AHV console, navigate to Settings > Image Configuration, and create two images (VAForwarder and VADynamic) by uploading the forwarder-va.vhd and dynamic.vhd respectively.
  4. Create a new VM with at least 1 VCPU (1 core), 1 GB RAM, and 1 NIC.
  5. Add a new disk using the VAForwarder image. Choose the operation Clone from Image Service and Bus Type as SCSI.
  6. Remove the CD-ROM. Add another disk using the VADynamic image with operation as Clone from Image Service and Bus Type as SCSI.

Note: The disk order is important. The VAForwarder should be Disk 0, the VADynamic should be Disk 1.

You can now power on the VA and configure it using either the console or by initiating an SSH connection to the VA. For information about configuring VAs, see Configure Virtual Appliances.

For more information about how to enhance throughput of the VA on Nutanix, see Enabling RSS Virtio-Net Multi-Queue by Increasing the Number of VNIC Queues.

Deploy VAs in KVM < Deploy VAs in Nutanix > Deploy VAs in Alibaba Cloud

Updated about 2 months ago