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This guide describes how to install Cisco Prime Infrastructure 3.10 as an OVA on VMware, Cisco Prime Infrastructure as an ISO on Hyper-V Virtual Machine.Prime Infrastructure is also available as a hardware appliance. For information on how to install the appliance, see the latest Cisco Prime Infrastructure Appliance Hardware Installation Guide. This guide also describes about the migration from the supported previous release Cisco Prime Infrastructure versions to Cisco Prime Infrastructure 3.10. For information about configuring and managing this product, see the Cisco Prime Infrastructure Administrator Guide and the Cisco Prime Infrastructure User Guide .
Prime Infrastructure licenses control the features that you can use and the number of devices you can manage using those features. For more information about:
Complete the tasks in the following sections before installing Prime Infrastructure.
Cisco ADE (Application Deployment Engine) OS Release 4.1 is supported till EOL of Prime Infrastructure.
Prime Infrastructure comes in two main forms:
During installation, you can choose one of four deployment configuration options. The following table summarizes the minimum server requirements for each option.
ESXi 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, or 7.0
ESXi 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, or 7.0
ESXi 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, or 7.0
ESXi 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, or 7.0
Throughput (Disk IOPS)
Minimum CPU Speed
1 You can configure any combination of sockets and cores, the product of which must equal the number of virtual CPUs required. For example, if 16 virtual CPUs are required, you can configure 4 sockets with 4 cores, or 2 sockets with 8 cores, etc.
You can install any of the Prime Infrastructure options as an Open Virtual Appliance (OVA), running under VMWare ESXi, on your own hardware. If you choose this implementation, the server that you supply must meet or exceed the requirements shown in the table for the option that you select.
Prime Infrastructure is available on the Prime Infrstructure Physical Appliance and Digital Network Architecture Center (DNAC) Appliance. Prime Infrastructure 3.10 not supported on the PRIME-NCS-APL-K9 (also known as “Gen 1”). Prime Infrastructure 3.10 is supported on PI-UCS-APL-K9 (also known as the Gen 2 appliance), PI-UCSM5-APL-K9 and PI-UCSM5-APL-U-K9 (also known as Gen 3 appliance) and DN1-HW-APL and DN2-HW-APL known as DNAC Appliance). The physical appliance specifications are as follows:
SSD - 4 x 900 GB
RAID Level RAID
1, 1, 10 (446(bootable), 1787, 3574 in GB)
1, 1, 10 (446(bootable), 1787, 5361 in GB)
Concurrent GUI clients
Concurrent API clients
Prime Infrastructure uses the 10G port as eth0 for Cisco DNA Center Appliance. You must perform the following steps to use the 1G port.
Gen-3 Appliance is supported from Prime Infrastructure 3.4.1.
While installing Prime Infrastructure on physical appliances, make sure network management IP address should be configured to Gigabit Ethernet 0 interface for all network management traffic (eg. netconf, telemetry, snmp etc).
Prime Infrastructure is also available pre-installed on Cisco-supplied hardware as a physical appliance. See the latest Cisco Prime Infrastructure Appliance Hardware Installation Guide for more information.
For maximum management capacities for each installation option, see How to Scale Prime Infrastructure
For better performance on the Prime Infrastructure Appliance (Gen 2 & Gen 3) or DNAC Appliance, make sure you configure the virtual drive Write Policy to Write Back Good BBU. To configure the virtual drive Write Policy, follow these steps:
Launch the CIMC web interface (see the section How to Set Up the Appliance in the latest Cisco Prime Infrastructure Appliance Hardware Installation Guide ).
Click the Storage tab, click on the Modular RAID Controller name, click the Virtual Drive tab. .
Select the Virtual Drive, then click Edit Virtual Drive .
Click OK on the dialog box that appears.
In the Write Policy field, select Write Back Good BBU , then click Save Changes .
If you are running ESX on custom hardware that has a RAID controller, we recommend you configure the following RAID settings to optimize Prime Infrastructure performance and redundancy:
Prime Infrastructure users access the product using a web browser client. Web client requirements are:
For all the versions of Prime Infrastructure, Prime XWT Widgets are not compatible with the latest versions of Chrome and Edge browsers. This impacts the prime xwt actions such as add, update, delete, duplicate, and so on.
It is recommended to use Firefox or lower versions of Chrome and Edge browsers to carry out the Prime XWT widget actions in the Prime Infrastructure.
To avoid this you can import CA Signed certificate in PI server through admin CLI. See Import CA-Signed Host Certificates from Ciso Prime Infrastructure 3.10 Admin Guide steps to generate CSR and import CA signed certificate.
Prime Infrastructure comes with a variety of server installation options (see Understand System Requirements). Ensure that you select an option appropriate for the size and complexity of your network.
The following table lists the maximum number of devices, clients, events, NetFlow-related data flows, and other scale parameters for each option. For example, the Professional option can manage 200,000 wireless clients and 50,000 wired clients.
Hardware Appliance (Gen 2) 2
Hardware Appliance (Gen 3)
Maximum number of devices (combination of wired and wireless devices)
Cisco Mobility Services Engine (MSE)
Changing Clients (every 5 minutes) 3
Events Sustained Rate (events per second; includes syslogs, traps, and system events)
System Event Rate
NetFlow Rate (flows per second) 4
Supported Hourly Host Records
Compliance Violation Limit 5
NAM Data Polling Enabled
Polling Interfaces (polling of trunk ports)
Number of Sites/Campus
Groups: User-Defined + Out of the Box + Device Groups + Port Groups
2 Compliance is supported on the Standard, Professional virtual appliance (OVA) and the Gen 2 appliance, Gen 3 applianceand DNAC Appliance only. It is not supported on: Express, Express Plus, OVAs that have been resized to Standard or Professional.If you are running Prime Infrastructure on an unsupported OVA or physical appliance and want to enable Compliance,you must perform a fresh install of the 3.10 Standard or Professional OVA or Gen2 appliance or Gen 3 Appliance or DNAC Appliance,then use backup/restore to migrate data from your old server to the new server. See Enabling Compliance Servicesin the Cisco Prime Infrastructure 3.10 Administrator Guide .
3 Changing Clients are wireless users who are roaming across APs or disassociating and associating to APs.
4 The NetFlow rate depends on the number of unique clients in the flows. The supported NetFlow rate is also based on the translated number of hourly host records (or unique combinations of server/client and applications) per day.
5 If the Compliance violation for the Professional virtual appliance exceeds 80000, the compliance job will not show any data.
When there is a high inflow of data for hosts, it triggers hosts_lt and hosts_mt tables to exceed the default max record count and retention age. Prime Infrastructure performance might get affected, and the services might go down while creating the backup file because of disk space issues. To address this issue, you must reduce the maximum records and age of the retention by 65% of the actual default settings of highly utilized tables, maximum records, and age.
Please ensure to select the Unified APs/Wireless client range within the specified limits mentioned in the table. If the AP count/Client count exceeds the given limit, Prime Infrastructure will throw an error "PGA memory used by the instance exceeds PGA_AGGREGATE_LIMIT".
Supported Scale for PnP Provisioning:
We recommend that you maintain an acceptable level of latency between your devices and the Cisco Prime Infrastructure server. A high latency might result in the server being unable to manage your devices, or the background tasks running slowly. A typical example of such a scenario is when you have thousands of APs and multiple Cisco Wireless Controllers managed by Prime Infrastructure across a WAN. In such a situation, we recommend that you install Prime Infrastructure in a local setup to ensure that the device response time is not impacted by queries from Prime Infrastructure.
The following table lists the Service Provider Wi-Fi parameters.
Number of clients
Sustain trap rate
Burst trap rate
400/sec for 10-minute duration
When using Operations Center, we recommend that you:
To help you roll out new versions of Prime Infrastructure at your own pace, Operations Center always supports management of instances of both the current and the very last version of Prime Infrastructure (also known as “N-1 management”).
The following table lists the Operations Center scaling parameters.
Operations Center Parameter
Number of managed instances
Concurrent GUI clients
See Physical Appliance Options for physical appliance options and the table under the section How to Scale Prime Infrastructure for installation option scaling information. For more information, see Set Up Operations Center in the latest Cisco Prime Infrastructure Administrator Guide.
The following table lists the Data Center parameters.
Hardware Appliance (Gen 2)
Hardware Appliance (Gen 3)
Data Center Switches
Cisco Nexus devices
Cisco UCS B-Series devices, Cisco UCS C-Series devices
The following table lists the number of records with the approximate size on disks for CDB parameters.
CDB/ Install Type
Hardware Appliance (Gen 2)
Hardware Appliance (Gen 3)
Custom NetFLow (per CDB created by user)
500 MB * no. of custom cdbs created
500 MB * no. of custom cdbs created
500 MB * no. of custom cdbs created
500 MB * no. of custom cdbs created
5 GB * no. of custom cdbs created
5 GB * no. of custom cdbs created
5 GB * no. of custom cdbs created
Disk Space used by Other CDBs
3 GB approximately
3 GB approximately
3 GB approximately
6 GB approximately
Prime Infrastructure provides the following installation options:
Before installing Prime Infrastructure on a virtual machine, you must:
The following steps explain how to install Prime Infrastructure on a virtual machine. Make sure that all of the system requirements are met before you deploy the OVA. Review the sections Understand System Requirements and Before You Begin Installation on a Virtual Machine.
If you are using ESXi 6.5 or later, you can deploy latest ova using Web Client.
When you import an OVA into vSphere using ESXi 7.0.2 or higher version, the Certificate is not trusted error appears in the Deploy OVF template window. To avoid this warning, add the signing certificate chain in to VECS store by following steps:
Launch your VMware vSphere Client and connect to the ESXi host or vCenter server.
Choose File > Deploy OVF Template .
Click Browse to access the location where you have saved the OVA file on your local machine, then click Next .
Verify the details on the OVF template details page, then click Next .
We will reserve half of the CPU resources and memory based on your OVA selection.
Ensure the Publisher field shows "DigiCert EV Code Signing CA (SHA2) (Trusted certificate)" and the Vendor field shows "Cisco Systems, Inc."
In the End User License Agreement window, click Accept , then click Next .
In the Name and Location window, specify:
In the Deployment Configuration window, select the desired configuration (for example, Express, Express Plus, Standard, Professional, etc.) and view the resources required for the configuration you selected.
It is mandatory to reserve 100% of CPU and memory resources for optimal performance.In the Host/Cluster window, select the host or cluster on which you want to deploy the OVF template, then click Next . (If the vSphere Client is connected directly to an ESXi host, this option does not appear.)
In the Storage window, select the datastore that has the required space requirements described in Understand System Requirements, then click Next .
In the Disk Format window, select Thick Provisioning to provision the virtual machine virtual disks, then click Next . Do not select Thin Provision because if there is no free disk space when the virtual machine needs it, Prime Infrastructure will fail.
In the Network Mapping window, select a network for the virtual machine to use, then click Next .
In the Ready to Complete window, review your settings, select Power on After Deployment , then click Finish .
Depending on your network speed and the IOPS of the server, the deployment can take a few minutes to complete.
Prime Infrastructure comes preinstalled on physical appliances, or you can install an image on an existing appliance. Complete the following steps to set up and start Prime Infrastructure on a virtual machine or physical appliance.
If you are using a virtual machine and it is not already powered on, in the VMware vSphere Client, right-click the deployed virtual appliance and choose Power > Power On .
Click the Console tab.
After the server boots up, you’ll see the localhost login prompt.
At the localhost login prompt, enter setup .
The console prompts you for the following parameters:
If an IPv6 address is not manually configured on the interface, or discovered dynamically, the IPv6 address will be automatically configured.
Keep your Prime Infrastructure password in a safe place. If you forget the password, see the section How to Recover Administrator Passwords on Virtual Appliances in the latest Cisco Prime Infrastructure Administrator Guide.
When you are done entering these values, you will be prompted for the following parameters:
Select Yes to proceed with the installation, or select No to re-enter high availability options.
When you are done entering these values, the installer application tests the network configuration parameters you have entered. If the tests are successful, it begins installing Prime Infrastructure.
When the installation is complete, the appliance reboots and you are presented with a login prompt.
Log in to the virtual machine using the “admin” username and password that you specified in Step 4.
Run the ncs status command (see the section Check Prime Infrastructure Server Status in the latest Cisco Prime Infrastructure User Guide) to verify that the processes have restarted. You should see the following process statuses:
You should check the validity of your Prime Infrastructure backup data by setting up an additional Prime Infrastructure server (either a spare Prime Infrastructure appliance or a new Prime Infrastructure virtual machine) and perform the restore operation as explained in Restore an Application Backup in the Cisco Prime Infrastructure Administrator Guide. If you do not have an additional Prime Infrastructure system to validate the backup, take at least two backups to reduce the risk of losing data.
If the restore operation does not work, or there are problems with the backed up image, try taking another backup from a production system, or try restoring from an earlier Prime Infrastructure backup.
If you cannot create a verified backup before installing this version of Prime Infrastructure, open a support case with Cisco TAC.
You can migrate from the following 3.7.x, 3.8.x, and 3.9.x Prime Infrastructure versions to Prime Infrastructure 3.10 :
If you are running multiple previous releases of Prime Infrastructure (for example, you are running version 3.7.x, 3.8.x, or 3.9.x), you must select one version from which to restore data. You cannot restore data from more than one Prime Infrastructure version. To combine data from multiple Prime Infrastructure versions:
See Before You Migrate Your Data before you start the following steps to restore your data from Prime Infrastructure 3.7.x, 3.8.x, and 3.9.x to your newly installed Prime Infrastructure 3.10 server:
Configure the new Prime Infrastructure host to use the same remote backup repository as the old host. For details, see Use a Remote Backup Repository in the Cisco Prime Infrastructure Administrator Guide.
Restore the application backup on the remote repository to the new host, as explained in Restore an Application Backup in the Cisco Prime Infrastructure Administrator Guide.
When the process is complete:
After the new Prime Infrastructure server is operational, decommission your previous server.
After restoring Prime Infrastructure 3.7.x, 3.8.x, and 3.9.x on a new Prime Infrastructure 3.10 virtual machine or hardware appliance, your Assurance license is automatically applied to the new server.
When you move your data to Prime Infrastructure 3.10, the following Assurance data will not get migrated:
5-minute, 1-hour, and 1-day aggregated data is migrated from Prime Infrastructure 3.7.x, 3.8.x, and 3.9.x to 3.10.
After restoring Prime Infrastructure 3.7.x, 3.8.x, and 3.9.x backup on a new Prime Infrastructure 3.10, your server’s records of Cisco Wireless LAN Controller configurations might be out of sync with the configurations stored on those devices. Resynchronize them using the following steps before continuing.
Log in to Prime Infrastructure.
Choose Inventory > Network Devices > Wireless Controller . Prime Infrastructure displays a list of all the controllers it is managing, including all Cisco WLCs.
Select a device, then click Sync .
Repeat steps 2 and 3 for all your other WLCs.
Follow the instructions in this section once you have finished installing Prime Infrastructure.
We strongly recommend you use signed certificates to ensure secure connections between clients and the Prime Infrastructure server. For information about creating a signed certificate, see Import CA-Signed Certificates in the latest Cisco Prime Infrastructure Administrator Guide.
Follow these steps to log in to the Prime Infrastructure user interface through a web browser:
Launch one of the Supported Browsers (see Understand System Requirements) on a different computer from the one on which you installed and started Prime Infrastructure.
In the browser’s address line, enter https://ipaddress , where ipaddress is the IP address of the server on which you installed Prime Infrastructure. The Prime Infrastructure user interface displays the Login window.
When you access Prime Infrastructure for the first time, some browsers will display a warning that the site is untrusted. When this happens, follow the prompts to add a security exception and download the self-signed certificate from the Prime Infrastructure server. After you complete this procedure, the browser will accept the Prime Infrastructure server as a trusted site in all future login attempts.
Click Login to log in to Prime Infrastructure. The user interface is now active and available for use. The home page appears.
If any licensing problems occur, a message appears in an alert box. If you have an evaluation license, the number of days until the license expires is shown. You are also alerted to any expired licenses. You have the option to go directly to the Administration > Licenses page to address these problems.
To ensure system security, choose Administration > Users, Roles & AAA > Change Password to change the password for the root administrator.
To exit the user interface, close the browser page or click Logout in the top-right corner of the page. Exiting a Prime Infrastructure user interface session does not shut down Prime Infrastructure on the server.
If a system administrator stops the Prime Infrastructure server during your Prime Infrastructure user interface session, your session ends, and the browser displays this message: “The page cannot be displayed.” Your session does not re-associate to Prime Infrastructure when the server restarts. You must start a new Prime Infrastructure session.
After you install Prime Infrastructure, you must perform additional tasks to begin managing your network. If you are an administrator, see the following sections in the latest Cisoc Prime Infrastructure Administrator Guide:
For information about installing the Cisco Plug and Play Application, see the Cisco Plug and Play Application Solutions Guide.
Users should complete the tasks listed in the chapter Get Started with Prime Infrastructure chapter in the latest Cisco Prime Infrastructure User Guide . After you complete these tasks, you are ready to start monitoring and configuring your network.
The following sections provide reference information about Prime Infrastructure and its support options.
The below table lists the ports used by Prime Infrastructure and Assurance. These ports must be open in firewalls if you are using these services.