Installing Catalyst Center (DNAC) 2.3.5 on Proxmox (Budget Friendly?)

Introduction

For many months—or maybe even a year now—I’ve been wondering if I’d ever get the chance to add Cisco DNA Center (now Cisco Catalyst Center) to my home lab.

At first, it felt like a huge “how?” The biggest challenge wasn’t just figuring out the installation process, but also meeting the hardware requirements… and of course, the budget. 😅 Catalyst Center isn’t exactly known for being lightweight, so both your server resources and your wallet need to be prepared.

I won’t dive too much into those considerations in this article—I’ll probably save that discussion for another blog. Instead, let’s get our hands dirty and start building!

Initial Setup

Before I started, I spent quite a bit of time researching different deployment methods. Two resources that really helped me were the YouTube channels of Mason Reimert and Terry Vinson (CCIEx2). Both have excellent content covering Proxmox and Cisco DNA Center/Catalyst Center deployments, and this blog follows a similar overall approach based on what I learned from them.

If you’re planning to build your own lab, I highly recommend checking out their channels for additional tips and explanations.

I also won’t be covering how to install or configure Proxmox VE itself. There are already plenty of great tutorials and documentation available online. Instead, this blog focuses specifically on the steps I took to deploy Cisco Catalyst Center on my existing Proxmox server.

i. Storage and Directory

The first thing I did was prepare a dedicated storage location for the Catalyst Center installation files. Rather than placing everything in the default storage, I created a dedicated directory specifically for Cisco Catalyst Center.
                       

ii. Upload the ISO file

Now it’s time to upload the Cisco Catalyst Center ISO file to the directory we created earlier.

Since the ISO is around 38 GB, don’t expect it to finish in just a few minutes. The upload time will largely depend on your network speed and the storage performance of your Proxmox server. In my case, it took a while, so this might be a good time to grab a cup of coffee. ☕

Once the upload is complete, we’re ready to create our virtual machine.

iii. Create the Virtual Machine

From the Proxmox VE web interface, click Create VM.

During the VM creation wizard, attach the Cisco Catalyst Center ISO that we uploaded in the previous step. For most of the settings, I simply left them at their default values

• Configure the VM name according to your preference. (Go to the PVE > Create VM)

• Select the uploaded Catalyst Center ISO image and leave the remaining options as default.
  
• I kept the default settings here as well, with one small change—I enabled the QEMU Agent. Although Catalyst Center can run without it, enabling the agent provides better integration with Proxmox and allows for improved VM management.
  
• Catalyst Center requires a significant amount of storage. For my lab, I allocated a 600 GB virtual disk, which provides enough space for the installation and future growth.
• For the processor configuration, I assigned: 40COres / 1socket

• For RAM, I assigned: 160000 MB (approximately 160 GB).

  

• Finally, assign the network interface that will be used for Catalyst Center’s management connectivity.

Although I’m now able to access the GUI, it appears that I still need to deploy the remaining services, which may take some time to complete.I’ll provide an update in Part 2 once the deployment is finished and confirm whether I was able to successfully complete the initial setup.