A virtual appliance provides operational flexibility and choice. For new customers, choosing a Cisco DNA Center Virtual Appliance for deployment in their data center eliminates additional capital expenditures. There are many other benefits of a virtual appliance: eliminating lengthy and expensive compliance and certification checks, fast automated deployment and high availability implemented with the use of native features. A virtual appliance in the cloud can also scale out; with Cisco DNA Virtual Appliance in the cloud, customers can manage up to 5,000 devices.

The Cisco DNA Center Virtual Appliance is designed to be deployed in a public cloud service starting with Amazon Web Services (and later Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) or in a VMware ESXi (and later Hyper-V and KVM) virtual environments located on-premises or in a co-location facility.

The virtual appliance from Cisco has feature parity with today’s physical Cisco DNA Center platform. Additionally, customers can take advantage of native high-availability features from AWS and VMware to deliver quality performance and minimize downtime.

Some customers, especially government agencies with strict security requirements, don’t want to deploy management solutions in the cloud. They require physical Cisco DNA Center appliances, so Cisco continues to supply them, thus providing options for customers and ensuring that networks can be physically isolated from unsecured networks like the public Internet or an unsecured LAN.

Current DNA Center customers wanting to migrate to the cloud can quickly, easily and cost-effectively add a separate instance of Cisco DNA Center Virtual Appliance to remote offices or branches, maintaining a physical appliance in their data center. This hybrid approach is seamless due to license portability and different platform options. You can easily deploy Cisco DNA Center in a data center or in a cloud using the same license.

Cisco DNA Center Virtual Appliance is an option for customers migrating from Cisco Prime management infrastructure to Cisco DNA Center. Cisco Prime Infrastructure includes a Cisco DNA Center coexistence and migration feature that allows users to easily export data from Cisco Prime Infrastructure to Cisco DNA Center. The two management and control systems can be operated in parallel, so IT teams can learn and get familiar with Cisco DNA Center before a complete system migration is performed. Teams can begin to migrate as soon as they are comfortable with the new paradigm for NetOps, AIOps, SecOps, and DevOps capabilities that Cisco DNA Center offers.

For more information about the Cisco DNA Center Virtual Appliance, as well as other Cisco solutions, please e-mail cisco@muk.group.