Nexus and MDS Management & Automation Made Simple!

As customers move to architect their data centers to support cloud model to enable them to respond quickly to business needs, software management and orchestration plays a key role in making that happen. Simply put you need software that easily integrates with existing infrastructure and provides ease of fabric automation and flexibility, visibility, troubleshooting and operation.

DCNM Dashboard with Customizable Dashlets

Cisco Data Center Network Management (DCNM) has evolved over the years to support such function and need for Nexus switches. The power of the NX-OS with DCNM can accelerate IT efficiencies operational model.

Let’s look at the newly released DCNM version 10 with the built-in data base and high availability:

Fabric automation – DCNM allows customers in Day 0 operation to make big fabric deployments easy, leading to lowered Opex. With Power-On Auto Provisioning (POAP), validated templates and definable fabrics, DCNM lets customers normalize fabric images, devices, provisioning methods, and Fabric underlay settings for reliable, consistent fabric behavior.

DCNM POAP Navigator

Defining New Fabric

Selecting a Validated VXLAN-EVPN Template

Fabric flexibility – Great for brownfield or greenfield deployments whether you have VxLAN, FabricPath and/or VLAN fabrics. Customers who have N7K/N5K and now thinking about VXLAN/IP Fabric — DCNM has you covered and lets you integrate Nexus 9K platform seamlessly. Only the Encapsulation and underlay Templates change.

FabricPath and VXLAN/IP Fabric templates for Nexus 7000

Fabric visibility – Very easy to visualize switches, links, health, vPC connections, FEX, End to end fabric view of network, virtual machine and storage.

VXLAN/IP Fabric and FabricPath on interactive topology view

Large Topology View with Storage

Fabric troubleshooting – in Day 1 & 2 operation, DCNM provides a view of the overall fabric, shows overlays regardless of encapsulation type (e.g. VXLAN or FabricPath), simplifies fabric troubleshooting and helps find things across the enterprise using multi-site/search (Aggregated DCNM search views across multiple sites)..

DCNM Multi-Site Manager

Fabric operation and automation – Engineer and customize the fabric solutions ahead of time to meet your business needs. Consolidate and automate current and next-gen overlay technology (VxLAN and FabricPath) on the same topology/manager. Integrate Border/Edge Router to the fabric seamlessly. Scale to many hundreds of devices.  Automate workload deployment for physical or virtual workloads and integrate with virtual machine management (e.g. OpenStack, VMware, UCS Director). Engineer deployment scenarios with a large library of customizable Configuration Profiles.

Fabric Automation Profiles for almost any Host automation scenario

Best of all, DCNM is designed to provide investment protection for customers allowing them to run across all Nexus platforms as well as MDS storage.