Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator – Cisco Data Center Orchestration

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator

More than ever, applications are critical for all global organizations. Applications and the data they carry are at the heart of digital transformation, providing not only essential back-office systems of record but also increasing frontline systems of engagement. As businesses grow, it is imperative to have agility in applications—to have the ability to move applications wherever the business needs them and to be sure that network security policies follow. With the unprecedented changes brought on recent years around the world, organizations see the necessity of having a connected and secure data center, wherever the data may exist.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard now supports on-boarding of Cisco NX-OS/DCNM sites. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (formerly Cisco Multi-Site Orchestrator-MSO) offers multisite networking orchestration and policy management, disaster recovery and high availability, as well as provisioning and health monitoring.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO) allows operators to realize a true hybrid cloud scenario, defining and orchestrating network policy across DCNM, ACI, cloud, and edge domains. NDO will also be the first application to work across both Cisco ACI and DCNM sites, making Nexus Dashboard a single pane of glass across Cisco ACI/APIC and Cisco NX-OS/DCNM controllers. Figure 1-11 shows the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.


Figure 1-11 Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator

NDO allows you to interconnect separate Cisco ACI sites, Cisco Cloud ACI sites, and Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) sites, each managed by its own controller (APIC cluster, DCNM cluster, or Cloud APIC instances in a public cloud). The on-premises sites (ACI or DCNM in the future) can be extended to different public clouds for hybrid-cloud deployments or for cloud-first multicloud-only deployments between cloud sites that do not have an on-premises site.

• Cisco ACI Multi-Site: For Cisco ACI, Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator is the intersite policy manager. It provides single-pane management, enabling you to monitor the health-score state of all interconnected sites. It also allows you to define, in a centralized place, all intersite policies, which can then be pushed to different APIC domains for rendering them on the physical switches in those fabrics. This provides a high degree of control over when and where to deploy the policies, which in turn allows the tenant change domain separation that uniquely characterizes the Cisco Multi-Site architecture. With Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, you can extend your policies to any site or multiple public clouds.

• Cisco DCNM Multi-Site: Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) is the network management platform for all NX-OS-enabled deployments, spanning new fabric architectures, IP Fabric for Media, and storage networking deployments. It provides automation, visibility, and consistency within a DCNM-clustered fabric. Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator now enables network policy consistency and disaster recovery across multiple DCNM fabrics around the world through a single pane of glass and scale-out DCNM leaf switches to thousands of switches managed using one centralized policy.

Common Use Cases

This section discusses some of the several use cases of Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, including large-scale data center deployment, data center interconnectivity, Cisco NDO multidomain integrations, hybrid cloud and multicloud, and service provider/5G telco.

Large-Scale Data Center Deployment

Some users require a data center solution based on software-defined networking (SDN) that consists of a higher number of leaf switches (for example, 20,000) with a single management console for provisioning, orchestration, and policy consistency. Cisco NDO can meet these requirements to help build these large-scale data centers through the following:

• Easy provisioning and orchestration

• Disaster recovery and high availability

• Enhanced scale

• Business continuity

Figure 1-12 illustrates a Cisco NDO large-scale data center deployment.


Figure 1-12 Large-scale data center deployment

Hardware vs. Software Stack – Cisco Data Center Orchestration

Hardware vs. Software Stack

Nexus Dashboard is offered as a cluster of specialized Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) servers (Nexus Dashboard platform) with the software framework (Nexus Dashboard) pre-installed on it. The Cisco Nexus Dashboard software stack can be decoupled from the hardware and deployed in a number of virtual form factors.

Each Nexus Dashboard cluster consists of three master nodes. For physical Nexus Dashboard clusters, you can also provision up to four worker nodes to enable horizontal scaling and up to two standby nodes for easy cluster recovery in case of a master node failure. For virtual and cloud clusters, only the base three-node cluster is supported.

Cisco Data Center Networking (DCN) Licensing

Following are the licensing options for greenfield and brownfield deployments:

• Cisco DCN Premier License (for greenfield): Provides Cisco Nexus Dashboard, Cisco Nexus Insights (formerly Network Insights Resources and Network Insights Advisor), and Cisco Network Assurance Engine (NAE). Users with an existing Essentials or Advantage subscription can transition to Premier and receive the Cisco Nexus Insights capabilities.

• Cisco DCN Day 2 Operations or D2Ops Solution Suite (for brownfield): This is recommended for users who already have a Cisco DCN Advantage or Essentials license. The bundle provides Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Cisco Nexus Insights and Network Assurance Engine.

Figure 1-8 illustrates Cisco DCN licensing and Nexus Dashboard orderability.


Figure 1-8 Cisco DCN Licensing and Nexus Dashboard orderability

Available Form Factors

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is available in physical, virtual, and cloud form factors:

• Cisco Nexus Dashboard physical appliance (.iso): This form factor refers to the original physical appliance hardware that you purchased with the Cisco Nexus Dashboard software stack pre-installed on it.

• VMware ESX (.ova): A virtual form factor that allows you to deploy a Nexus Dashboard cluster using three VMware ESX virtual machines.

• Amazon Web Services (.ami): A cloud form factor that allows you to deploy a Nexus Dashboard cluster using three AWS instances.

• Microsoft Azure (.arm): A cloud form factor that allows you to deploy a Nexus Dashboard cluster using three Azure instances.

After Cisco Nexus Dashboard cluster deployment, you can perform all remaining actions using its GUI. To access Cisco Nexus Dashboard GUI, simply browse to any one of the nodes’ management IP addresses. Figure 1-9 shows the Cisco Nexus Dashboard general view.


Figure 1-9 Cisco Nexus Dashboard general view

With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, you get a unified operations view across all your sites and services. Cisco Nexus Dashboard scales out based on the size, number of sites, and the operational services used to manage them.

The Dashboard provides a wholistic view of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard. You can use this view to monitor system health, sites, and the connectivity status of applications. Figure 1-10 shows the Cisco Nexus Dashboard One View GUI.


Figure 1-10 Cisco Nexus Dashboard One View GUI

Features and Benefits – Cisco Data Center Orchestration

Features and Benefits

Table 1-1 lists the features and benefits of Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

Table 1-1 Features and Benefits of Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Too often the network operations team spends most of its time gathering troubleshooting data to triage and root-cause an issue. The burden of tying together siloed insights from a fragmented operational toolkit often lies with the operations team. As the company’s data center footprint extends from the on-premises data center to the cloud, and as modern application architectures become the de-facto standard, the operations team needs a unified operations toolchain with a seamless user experience to maintain and operate such complex environments.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard unifies these disparate toolsets and experiences for the operations teams to consume the rich and powerful capabilities of Day 2 operations solutions and executes multisite policies from a single pane of glass. Unnecessary handoffs between toolchains and dealing with multiple portals and credentials to get to troubleshooting data and insights have become a thing of the past. An operator logs in once to Cisco Nexus Dashboard and is able to go straight to the Discover, Analyze, Remediate, Automate workflow from a single launchpad. Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers a powerful and rich set of capabilities, including the following:

• Single sign-on (SSO): SSO powers the frictionless interaction between Cisco Nexus Dashboard and the hosted services. The operator logs in once and is able to switch seamlessly between services and also site controllers such as Cisco APIC, Cloud APIC, and NDFC.

• Unified operations platform: The Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform is a powerful unified platform capable of scaling out horizontally to accommodate application needs. With a modern microservices infrastructure services stack on a clustered architecture, the same underlying platform can be used to co-host the entire Day 2 applications portfolio, thus reducing the burden of the underlying software and hardware lifecycle maintenance.

Figure 1-4 illustrates Cisco Nexus Dashboard components.


Figure 1-4 Cisco Nexus Dashboard components

• Persona-based dashboard: Cisco Nexus Dashboard has two primary personas:

• The administrator, who is able to manage all the Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform infrastructure services and hardware from a single pane of glass. The administrator is also able to install, upgrade, and launch all services on the Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform. This role can set up common sites and services for the applications to use from a single pane of glass. Figure 1-5 shows the Cisco Nexus Dashboard System Overview, and Figure 1-6 shows common sites and services from a single pane of glass.


Figure 1-5 Cisco Nexus Dashboard System Overview


Figure 1-6 Common sites and services from a single pane of glass

• The operator, who is able to get an aggregate view of the health of the sites and with a single click, navigate to the Insights service, gain more information about critical anomalies, and scroll through the temporal view to get historical context. If the operator then needs to make changes to policy, they can easily switch to the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator and roll out changes to multiple sites, including public cloud environments, all from a single portal.

• Common infrastructure services: Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a host of common infrastructure services, such as common site onboarding, authentication domains, role-based access control (RBAC), notification services, and API services.

• Flexible deployment options: The Cisco Nexus Dashboard portfolio is composed of physical, virtual, and cloud form factors, giving customers unprecedented flexibility while deploying their operations infrastructure and at the same time ensuring a common and unified operator experience through a single pane of glass.

• Programmable infrastructure: Third-party automation tools are critical to improving reporting workflows and responding to issues encountered by distributed workloads. Cisco Nexus Dashboard has built-in integrations with many third-party services such as ServiceNow, one of the most prevalent IT service management platforms. With the ServiceNow integrations, NetOps and DevOps teams can open and track tickets from within Nexus Dashboard. From one portal, operations teams get visibility into the status of open tickets, resulting in the automation of troubleshooting for faster resolutions across fabrics.

• SR-MPLS with Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator: With Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, SR-MPLS (Segment Routing with Multiprotocol Label Switching) policies can be centrally automated across 5G telco cloud sites (central, regional, and edge data centers). Cisco Nexus Dashboard with Insights and Orchestrator services is the most comprehensive way to automate distributed data centers, overcoming the challenges of managing the infrastructure, applications, and data sources distributed over disparate locations.

With these services integrated into Cisco Nexus Dashboard, NetOps teams can achieve command and control over global network fabrics, optimizing performance and attaining insights into data center and cloud operations.

• Cisco Nexus Dashboard One View: The Cisco Nexus Dashboard operations infrastructure can be deployed and managed at scale via a single pane of glass. Figure 1-7 illustrates Cisco Nexus Dashboard One View.


Figure 1-7 Cisco Nexus Dashboard One View

Cisco Nexus Dashboard – Cisco Data Center Orchestration

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Cisco Nexus Dashboard revolutionizes operations in today’s modern data center environments. Network operations teams are struggling to reconcile fragmented toolchains, an inconsistent user experience (UX), and siloed processes in order to manage complex data center environments that include on-premises infrastructure and public cloud sites. Cisco Nexus Dashboard specifically addresses this pain point by providing a single pane of glass from which to manage a unified operations infrastructure based on the Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform. Based on a horizontal, scale-out architecture, Cisco Nexus Dashboard can unify operations from the on-premises infrastructure (Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure [Cisco ACI] or Cisco NX-OS with Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller [NDFC]) to co-locations and to the public cloud. Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a seamless user experience for the operator, whether it is to rapidly troubleshoot issues or execute change window actions with a high degree of confidence. Operators spend more time on the “logistics ladder” of traditionally fragmented toolchains before any operational value is realized. With the frictionless user experience of Cisco Nexus Dashboard, operators can focus on what they do best—troubleshooting, triaging, and executing change windows with a high degree of confidence, rather than figuring out URLs, credentials, and access controls.

The intuitive Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform provides services such as Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker, and a single operational view of geographically dispersed multicloud environments. The platform enables the acceleration of NetOps and DevOps capabilities while scaling into the cloud, and it aligns seamlessly with third-party ecosystem tools from HashiCorp Terraform, ServiceNow, and Splunk, with other integrations to come.

The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (formerly Cisco ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator [MSO]), Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights (formerly Nexus Insights [NI]), and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker (formerly Nexus Data Broker) services are being integrated into the Cisco Nexus Dashboard as native services in order to simplify the customer experience:

• Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator: Formerly Cisco ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator, the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator service allows operators to push policies and templates and set up intersite connectivity at scale. Besides delivering high-level policies to the local data center controller—also referred to as the domain controller—it enables separation of fault domains, federation of data center and cloud networks, and business resiliency at a global scale. Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator also enables end-to-end change management workflows, centralized fabric management and upgrades, multi/hybrid-cloud connectivity, normalized segmentation, and security policies across the data center, SD-WAN, and enterprise branch and campus networks. For example, the SD-WAN integration provides application-aware SLA-based routing (policy-based path selection and quality of service [QoS] treatment) in the SD-WAN infrastructure used for interconnecting sites.

• Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights: Formerly Nexus Insights, the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights service allows operators to consume the entire insights and assurance stack as a unified offering but also to take advantage of the integrated services to set up automated workflows such as upgrade assist and automated Splunk SIEM (security information and event management) integration. It incorporates a set of advanced alerting, baselining, correlation, and forecasting algorithms to provide a deep understanding into the behavior of the network. It also analyzes flow telemetry data streamed from Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches to provide perfect introspection into hybrid cloud infrastructure. The Insights service and AppDynamics are tightly integrated to pinpoint exactly where and when an application issue originated from a network perspective.

• Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker: Formerly Nexus Data Broker, the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker service is now a part of Cisco Nexus Dashboard, which provides pervasive packet and network visibility for NetOps and SecOps to programmatically manage aggregating, filtering, and forwarding complete workflows to custom analytics tools. It is a multitenant-capable solution that can be used with both Nexus and Cisco Catalyst fabrics. It replaces the traditional purpose-built network packet broker appliances with high-throughput Cisco Nexus switches, enabling IT to create cost-effective and scale-out packet broker fabrics.

• Third-party applications: Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers a rich suite of services for third-party developers to build applications. REST APIs allow third-party tools to authenticate and integrate with key services such as Nexus Dashboard Insights and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator. Currently supported third-party integrations in the Nexus Dashboard ecosystem include ServiceNow ITSM/ITOM, Splunk SIEM, HashiCorp Terraform, and Red Hat Ansible.

• Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller: Cisco Nexus Dashboard can also host Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), similar to the hosting of operational services. This unified capability gives customers a single touch point on their journey from installation to operations. This brings the controller for fabrics based on Cisco NX-OS under the Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform and unleashes the benefits of faster time to deploy and upgrade and an improved overall user experience to Cisco NDFC.

The operations team now has to deal with a single stack and one operations toolkit—whether they are running Cisco ACI or Cisco NDFC in their hybrid cloud infrastructures. Figure 1-3 illustrates the Cisco Nexus Dashboard graphical user interface (GUI).


Figure 1-3 Cisco Nexus Dashboard GUI

Operational infrastructure standardization and toolchain unification directly lead to operational excellence and savings as well as free up resources for business innovation.

IT Challenges and Data Center Solutions – Cisco Data Center Orchestration

IT Challenges and Data Center Solutions

Organizations are deploying applications in multiple public and private clouds, with more applications than ever. There are also more different classes of people and machines using these applications.

As a result of containers, which have microservices and are serverless, developers are constructing these highly distributed application constructs with workload tiers and data services spread across hybrid IT, spanning on-premises data centers and multiple public clouds. Because of these trends, multicloud data center operators are facing serious challenges, including the following:

• Approximately 40% of skilled IT staff time is spent on troubleshooting in break-fix mode.

• The majority of network outages are due to human error, leading to unplanned downtime.

These issues require network operators to have a high level of domain expertise and the ability to correlate complex IT environments to prevent or fix issues while upholding the infrastructure uptime to honor service level agreements (SLAs) with minimum disruptions.

Day 0 is design and procurement; Day 1 is installing, provisioning, and segmenting; and Day 2 is running a network. Most of the challenges currently faced by network operators are related to the Day 2 operations capabilities of running a network.

IT needs a way to transform and get past installing, provisioning, and segmenting. To make Day 2 operations easier, IT needs to be able to do the following:

• Analyze every component of a data center first.

• Ensure business intent.

• Guarantee reliability.

• Detect performance issues proactively in a network.

Figure 1-1 illustrates the main challenges in network operations.


Figure 1-1 Main challenges in network operations

To be successful, IT needs to be in a strategic partnership with business. Without this, it’s impossible to efficiently help enable the changes necessary to enable business growth. Cisco believes analytics enable IT professionals to turn raw data into actionable insights that they can use to drive business growth. When IT practitioners move to a proactive operations approach for their data center, both sides win. Figure 1-2 illustrates the Cisco data center solutions.


Figure 1-2 Cisco data center solutions

Data center analytics and automation capabilities both within and across domains help in simplifying the network operations and attain the insights and assurance needed to continually evolve them. This is key for an intent-based networking (IBN) strategy.

The Data center analytics and automation provides the following capabilities:

• To begin, pull critical telemetry information out of the data and control planes and making it available to the analytics layer. Cisco has done this through silicon innovation, turning every networking device into a sensor.

• Stitch together network, security, and application analytics to provide a single source of truth for IT operations teams and a unified view across data center, campus, WAN, branch office, and cloud environments.

• Provide artificial intelligence/machine learning–based decision support tools for a range of common operations activities such as upgrade planning and software release guidance, proactive service level monitoring, and smart troubleshooting based on graph-based search.

• Extend to cloud-based analytics and mobile phone dashboard option.

The business sees the following benefits:

• Highest operational uptime and outage mitigation to meet SLAs/SLOs

• Operational expenditure (OpEx) optimization and IT strategic agility enhancement

• Security compliance and assurance

And IT sees these benefits:

• Faster remediation of issues while increasing agility

• Engineers can focus on mission-critical work

• Greater confidence and less risk in operating the network

IT Challenges and Data Center Solutions – Cisco Data Center Orchestration

Organizations are deploying applications in multiple public and private clouds, with more applications than ever. There are also more different classes of people and machines using these applications.

As a result of containers, which have microservices and are serverless, developers are constructing these highly distributed application constructs with workload tiers and data services spread across hybrid IT, spanning on-premises data centers and multiple public clouds. Because of these trends, multicloud data center operators are facing serious challenges, including the following:

• Approximately 40% of skilled IT staff time is spent on troubleshooting in break-fix mode.

• The majority of network outages are due to human error, leading to unplanned downtime.

These issues require network operators to have a high level of domain expertise and the ability to correlate complex IT environments to prevent or fix issues while upholding the infrastructure uptime to honor service level agreements (SLAs) with minimum disruptions.

Day 0 is design and procurement; Day 1 is installing, provisioning, and segmenting; and Day 2 is running a network. Most of the challenges currently faced by network operators are related to the Day 2 operations capabilities of running a network.

IT needs a way to transform and get past installing, provisioning, and segmenting. To make Day 2 operations easier, IT needs to be able to do the following:

• Analyze every component of a data center first.

• Ensure business intent.

• Guarantee reliability.

• Detect performance issues proactively in a network.

Figure 1-1 illustrates the main challenges in network operations.


Figure 1-1 Main challenges in network operations

To be successful, IT needs to be in a strategic partnership with business. Without this, it’s impossible to efficiently help enable the changes necessary to enable business growth. Cisco believes analytics enable IT professionals to turn raw data into actionable insights that they can use to drive business growth. When IT practitioners move to a proactive operations approach for their data center, both sides win. Figure 1-2 illustrates the Cisco data center solutions.


Figure 1-2 Cisco data center solutions

Data center analytics and automation capabilities both within and across domains help in simplifying the network operations and attain the insights and assurance needed to continually evolve them. This is key for an intent-based networking (IBN) strategy.

The Data center analytics and automation provides the following capabilities:

• To begin, pull critical telemetry information out of the data and control planes and making it available to the analytics layer. Cisco has done this through silicon innovation, turning every networking device into a sensor.

• Stitch together network, security, and application analytics to provide a single source of truth for IT operations teams and a unified view across data center, campus, WAN, branch office, and cloud environments.

• Provide artificial intelligence/machine learning–based decision support tools for a range of common operations activities such as upgrade planning and software release guidance, proactive service level monitoring, and smart troubleshooting based on graph-based search.

• Extend to cloud-based analytics and mobile phone dashboard option.

The business sees the following benefits:

• Highest operational uptime and outage mitigation to meet SLAs/SLOs

• Operational expenditure (OpEx) optimization and IT strategic agility enhancement

• Security compliance and assurance

And IT sees these benefits:

• Faster remediation of issues while increasing agility

• Engineers can focus on mission-critical work

• Greater confidence and less risk in operating the network

Optimize Hyperconverged Workloads – Cisco Data Center Solutions for Hybrid Cloud

Optimize Hyperconverged Workloads

Cisco Workload Optimization Manager works with many third-party solutions to ensure your applications get the resources they need. However, its deep integration with the entire Cisco environment greatly enhances your Cisco deployments to optimize your data centers. It helps you safely maximize cloud elasticity in Cisco UCS server environments and Cisco Hyperflex systems to gain better performance and efficiency. With Cisco Tetration network awareness, you can confidently re-platform to application architectures that have increased network complexity. Cisco Cloud Center can help you intelligently deploy new workloads anywhere, anytime. Cisco Workload Optimization Manager optimizes initial cloud placement for performance, cost, and compliance. Figure 3-18 illustrates CWOM meeting changing demands.


Figure 3-18 CWOM meeting changing demands

Ensure Application Performance

Application awareness with AppDynamics metrics complements Cisco Workload Optimization Manager and enables you to do the following:

• Continuously ensure application performance and eliminate application performance risk due to infrastructure

• Show your IT organization’s value to the business when infrastructure-resource decisions are directly tied to the performance of business-critical applications

• Bridge the application-infrastructure gap with full-stack control that elevates teams and provides a common understanding of application dependencies

• Accelerate and de-risk application migration with a holistic understanding of application topology, resource utilization, and the data center stack

Figure 3-19 illustrates CWOM meeting AppDynamics.


Figure 3-19 CWOM meeting AppDynamics

Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco Workload Optimization Manager provide complete visibility and insight into application and infrastructure interdependencies and business performance. The result is application-aware IT infrastructure that is continuously resourced to deliver business objectives. Figure 3-20 illustrates the CWOM and AppDynamics benefits.


Figure 3-20 CWOM and AppDynamics benefits

Cisco Workload Optimization Manager – Cisco Data Center Solutions for Hybrid Cloud

Cisco Workload Optimization Manager

Data centers and applications are getting more complex and distributed. The result is a dizzying array of monitoring, orchestration, and management solutions that have not been able to ensure workload performance. In addition, applications are becoming more distributed and complex as enterprises build them on containers and microservices in multicloud environments. The ability to continuously deliver application performance while minimizing costs is critical. It enables development teams to innovate and run applications efficiently. It ensures that end users and customers have great digital experiences. It drives revenue. However, workload management is now so complex that it is moving beyond human capabilities.

Cisco Workload Optimization Manager (CWOM) is a real-time decision engine that drives continuous health in the IT environment. Its intelligent software constantly analyzes workload consumption, costs, and compliance constraints. It ensures application performance by giving workloads the resources they need, when they need them. Figure 3-16 illustrates today’s workload management.


Figure 3-16 Today’s workload management

Cisco Workload Optimization Manager is an easy-to-install, agentless technology that detects relationships and dependencies between the components in your environment, from applications through the infrastructure layers. Within one hour of deployment, Cisco Workload Optimization Manager delivers a global topological mapping of your environment (local and remote, and across private and public clouds) and the interdependent relationships within the environment, mapping each layer of the full infrastructure stack to application demand. Figure 3-17 illustrates closed-loop infrastructure optimization using CWOM.


Figure 3-17 Closed-loop infrastructure optimization using CWOM

Cisco Workload Optimization Manager provides specific real-time actions that ensure workloads get the resources they need when they need them, enabling continuous placement, resizing, and capacity decisions that can be automated, driving continuous health in the environment. Once Cisco Workload Optimization Manager is deployed, you connect to your browser of choice, add the license key, and select your targets. After you have selected your targets, you then add IP addresses, usernames, and password credentials. Targets include hypervisors, cloud platforms, applications, storage, network, and more. Cisco Workload Optimization Manager uses these targets to discover your environment and determine the specific actions that will drive continuous health in your environment.

Infrastructure as a Service – Cisco Data Center Solutions for Hybrid Cloud

Infrastructure as a Service

Cisco UCS Director delivers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for both virtual and physical infrastructure. With Cisco UCS Director, you can create an application container template that defines the infrastructure required for a specific application or how a customer or business unit is expected to use that application. Cisco UCS Director helps IT teams to define the rules for the business’s infrastructure services:

• Either you can first onboard tenants and then define the boundaries of the physical and virtual infrastructure that they can use, or you can allow your onboarded tenants to define the infrastructure boundaries.

• Create policies, orchestration workflows, and application container templates in Cisco UCS Director that define the requirements for a specific type of application that can be used by a tenant, such as a web server, database server, or generic virtual machine (VM).

• Publish these templates as a catalog in the End User Portal.

Users can go to the End User Portal, select the catalog that meets their needs, and make a service request for that particular application or VM. Their service request triggers the appropriate orchestration workflow to allocate the required infrastructure and provision the application or VM.

If the service request requires approvals, Cisco UCS Director sends emails to the specified approver(s). Once the service request is approved, Cisco UCS Director assigns the infrastructure to those users, creating a virtual machine if necessary, and doing the base configuration, such as provisioning the operating system. You can also configure an orchestration workflow to ask questions before allowing a user to choose a catalog item. Here are some points to keep in mind:

• You can configure the workflow to ask the user what type of application they plan to run and automatically select a catalog for them based on the answers to those questions.

• The end user does not have to worry about whether to request a physical server or a VM, what kind of storage they require, or which operating system to install. Everything is predefined and prepackaged in the catalog.

For example, you can create policies, orchestration workflows, and an application container template for an SAP application that uses a minimum level of infrastructure, requires approvals from a director in the company, and has a chargeback to the department. When an end user makes a service request in the End User Portal for that catalog item, Cisco UCS Director does the following:

1. Sends an email to the director, who is the required approver.

2. When the approval is received, Cisco UCS Director creates a VM in the appropriate pod with four CPUs, 10GB of memory, and 1TB of storage.

3. Installs an operating system (OS) on the VM.

4. Notifies the end user that the VM is available for them to use.

5. Sets up the chargeback account for the cost of the VM.

With the available APIs from Cisco UCS Director, you can also script custom workflows to pre-install the SAP application in the VM after the OS is installed.

Cisco UCS Director enables you to automate a wide array of tasks and use cases across a wide variety of supported Cisco and non-Cisco hardware and software data center components, including physical infrastructure automation at the compute, network, and storage layers. A few examples of the use cases that you can automate include, but are not limited to, the following:

• VM provisioning and lifecycle management

• Network resource configuration and lifecycle management

• Storage resource configuration and lifecycle management

• Tenant onboarding and infrastructure configuration

• Application infrastructure provisioning

• Self-service catalogs and VM provisioning

• Bare-metal server provisioning, including installation of an operating system

For each of the processes that you decide to automate with orchestration workflows, you can choose to implement the processes in any of the following ways:

• Use the out-of-the-box workflows provided with Cisco UCS Director.

• Modify the out-of-the-box workflows with one or more of the tasks provided with Cisco UCS Director.

• Create your own custom tasks and use them to customize the out-of-the-box workflows.

• Create your own custom workflows with custom tasks and the out-of-the-box tasks.

Beginning with version 6.6, Cisco UCS Director can be claimed as a managed device in Intersight, so usage data, license usage, and so on can be collected. UCS Director administrators can update UCS Director southbound connectors that are used to communicate with supported devices, including networking and storage platforms, during a maintenance window for rapid delivery of new features and functionality. This will enable users to leverage endpoint capabilities and APIs faster through UCS Director by enabling the update of device libraries. Figure 3-12 illustrates Cisco UCS Director Intersight integration.


Figure 3-12 Cisco UCS Director Intersight integration

The benefits of SaaS and CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) can be achieved by claiming on-premises UCS Director instances in Intersight. Once these are claimed, the traditional on-premises software is transformed into a secure hybrid SaaS setup that delivers ongoing new capabilities:

• Automatic downloads of software enhancements upgrades, bug fixes, and updates for the following:

• UCS Director Base Platform Pack

• System Update Manager

• Infrastructure specific Connector Packs (EMC storage, F5 load balancers, RedHat KVM)

• Enhanced problem resolution with Cisco Support through Intersight

• Proactive notifications and streamlined “one-click” diagnostics collection

Figure 3-13 illustrates Cisco UCS Director Intersight integration benefits.


Figure 3-13 Cisco UCS Director Intersight integration benefits

UCS Director–specific dashboard widgets can be added to provide useful summary information for the following:

• Instance summary

• Service status summary

• Last backup status

• Trends for last 10 backups

Figure 3-14 shows the UCS Director dashboard widgets in Intersight.


Figure 3-14 UCS Director dashboard widgets in Intersight

It is possible for an Intersight workflow to call a UCSD workflow, if desired, which can allow an organization to gradually migrate to Intersight as the primary orchestrator. However, the UCS Director and Intersight workflows are not compatible, and they cannot be directly imported from UCS Director into Intersight.

With Cisco ACI, you can create application infrastructure containers that contain the appropriate network services as well as support infrastructure components for each respective application. Figure 3-15 illustrates UCS Director integration with ACI.


Figure 3-15 UCS Director integration with ACI

The following are the business benefits of Cisco UCS Director and Cisco ACI integration:

• Cisco UCS Director and Cisco ACI integrate through native tasks and prebuilt workflows.

• This integration supports IaaS with three main features:

• Secure multitenancy

• Rapid application deployment

• Self-service portal

Secure Multitenancy

The integrated solution provides consistent delivery of infrastructure components that are ready to be consumed by clients in a secured fashion. Here are some key points concerning secure multitenancy:

• The solution optimizes resource sharing capabilities and provides secure isolation of clients without compromising quality of service (QoS) in a shared environment.

• To provide IaaS, secure multitenancy reserves resources for exclusive use and securely isolate them from other clients.

• Cisco ACI supports multitenancy by using Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) tunnels internally within the fabric, inherently isolating tenant and application traffic.

• Cisco UCS Director manages the resource pools assigned to each container. Only Cisco supports secure multitenancy that incorporates both physical and virtual resources.

Rapid Application Deployment

The combination of Cisco UCS Director and Cisco ACI enhances your capability to rapidly deploy application infrastructure for you and your clients. With the increasing demands of new applications and the elastic nature of cloud environments, administrators need to be able to quickly design and build application profiles and publish them for use by clients. Cisco UCS Director, in conjunction with Cisco ACI, gives you the ability to quickly meet the needs of your clients. Here are some key points concerning rapid application deployment:

• Cisco UCS Director interacts with Cisco ACI to automatically implement the networking services that support applications. In Cisco UCS Director, you can specify a range of Layer 4 through Layer 7 networking services between application layers that are deployed with a zero-touch automated configuration model.

• You can dynamically place workloads based on current network conditions so that service levels are maintained at the appropriate level for the applications being supported by the client.

• You can use resource groups to establish tiers of resources based on application requirements, including computing, networking, and storage resources, with varying levels of performance. For example, a bronze level of service might be used for developers and include resources such as thin-provisioned storage and virtualized computing resources. In contrast, a gold level of service might be used for production environments and include thick-provisioned storage and bare-metal servers for performance without compromise.

• After your resources and services are deployed, you can monitor your application infrastructure with real-time health scores, dynamically reconfigure your network if necessary to meet your performance goals, and obtain resource consumption information that can be used for charging clients.

• Cisco UCS Director in conjunction with Cisco ACI also provides complete application infrastructure lifecycle management, returning resources to their respective free pools and eliminating stranded resources.

Self-Service Portal

After you have defined or adopted a set of application profiles, you can make them available to clients in a service catalog visible in the self-service portal. Your clients can log in to Cisco UCS Director’s self-service portal, view the service catalog published by your organization, and order the infrastructure as desired.

The application profiles you define can be parameterized so that clients can provide attributes during the ordering process to customize infrastructure to meet specific needs.

For example, clients can be allowed to specify the number of servers deployed in various application infrastructure tiers or the amount of storage allocated to each database server. After your clients have placed their orders, they can monitor the status of application infrastructure orders, view the progress of application infrastructure deployment, and perform lifecycle management tasks.

Cisco UCS Management Through Cisco UCS Director – Cisco Data Center Solutions for Hybrid Cloud

Cisco UCS Management Through Cisco UCS Director

Cisco UCS Director is not a replacement for Cisco UCS Manager. Rather, Cisco UCS Director uses orchestration to automate some of the steps required to configure a Cisco UCS domain. In this way, Cisco UCS Director provides a statistical analysis of the data and a converged view of each pod.

After you add a Cisco UCS domain to Cisco UCS Director as a Cisco UCS Manager account, Cisco UCS Director provides you with complete visibility into the Cisco UCS domain. In addition, you can use Cisco UCS Director to manage and configure that Cisco UCS domain.

Cisco UCS Management Tasks You Can Perform in Cisco UCS Director

You can use Cisco UCS Director to perform management, monitoring, and reporting tasks for physical and virtual devices within a Cisco UCS domain.

Configuration and Administration

You can create and configure the following Cisco UCS hardware and software components in Cisco UCS Director:

• Fabric interconnects, including ports

• Chassis, blade servers, and rack-mount servers, including auto-discovery

• I/O modules and fabric extenders (FEXes)

• Network connections

• Storage connections

• Pools

• Policies

• Service profiles

Monitoring and Reporting

You can also use Cisco UCS Director to monitor and report on your Cisco UCS domains and their components, including:

• Power consumption

• Temperature

• Server availability

• Service profile association

Table 3-1 details the UCS Director orchestration components.

Table 3-1 UCS Director Orchestration Components

Orchestration and Automation

Cisco UCS Director provides model-based orchestration through workflows. These workflows can include complex logic, can be imported into or exported from Cisco UCS Director, and can be configured to resume from the point of last failure. You can also include advanced orchestration features that provide agility, such as rollback of workflows, and enable you to automate the provisioning and de-provisioning of resources. This functionality is possible because Cisco UCS Director is model-aware and state-aware.

Cisco UCS Director enables you to build workflows that provide automation services and to publish those workflows and extend their services on demand. The Workflow Designer is a drag-and-drop orchestration editor that includes a large library of out-of-the-box workflow tasks and workflows.

Depending on your business needs, you can use or modify the out-of-the-box workflows and workflow tasks or you can develop your own custom workflows or workflow tasks. Custom workflow tasks can use Cloupia Script, a Java script-like programming language, REST APIs, or PowerShell cmdlets. In the workflows, you can combine your custom tasks with out-of-the-box generic tasks.

You may embed approvals inside a workflow to ensure that resources are not provisioned until they have been approved. Once built and validated, these workflows perform the same way every time, no matter who runs them or where they are run.

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