Flexible Backup and Restore with PoAP Personality Profile

This is a guest blog written by Sunil Gudurvalmiki, Product Manager, Insieme Business Unit.

Data center operations teams are increasingly looking at tools to automate and simplify the manual tasks. In addition, they are driving towards using the same tools across compute, storage and network. Cisco announced the availability of Cisco Open NXOS to enable customers reach this goal by installing Open Source and custom developed DevOps tools on Nexus switches.

Two interesting challenges arise that require changes to adapt to new tools and software on the switch:

Revert the switch back to a known working state if any recent changes made the device unusable or unauthorized changes were done.
RMA scenario where a faulty switch is replaced with a new device and the new device needs to inherit the entire personality from the previous device.

Today, we are happy to introduce a powerful new capability “POAP Personality Profile” as part of Open NXOS in Cisco NX-OS Release 7.0(3)I4(1) to address the above challenges. Using POAP Personality Profile capability, customers can snapshot the personality of the switch at a given time and restore to that snapshot when needed.

The personality of the switch is customizable and it includes the following:

Image version
Running configuration
Startup configuration
Patches installed
Packages installed
Scripts
User data

Multiple script directories and user data directories can be included in the personality at run time.

While taking a snap shot, the switch does not backup the binaries for packages and patches; instead, it just records the meta data to save space. While restoring the switch, repositories can be used to download the binaries and install the packages and patches.

Taking personality backups can be automated using the scheduler and the whole process can be automated using NX-API. This capability is integrated into the POAP workflow to make the RMA scenario completely zero touch.

We hope you’re as excited about this capability as we are. As always, please let us know what you’d like to see in future versions.

POAP Personality profile is supported on Cisco Nexus 9000 and Nexus 3000/3100/3200 series switches in 7.0(3)I4(1) release.

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