RISE on Nexus 7k switches with Cisco Prime NAM

Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module (NAM) has been integrated with Nexus 7k/7700 Series using Cisco® Remote Integrated Services Engine (RISE) technology providing a powerful story for data center integration. RISE with Prime NAM provides high performance monitoring and packet analysis on multiple virtual device contexts along with switch interface statistics for all modules.

Cisco RISE is being used by a large number of customers to tightly integrate the Cisco Nexus series switches with the Cisco Prime NAM to provide VDC awareness and SPAN traffic across multiple VDCs without burning slots on the switch. RISE overcomes the limitation of applying SPAN configuration only in the VDC to which the management cable is attached by intelligently managing the movement of NAM data ports and SPAN configuration to other VDCs as needed. The integration includes the following main features:

• NAM appliance acts as a module on Nexus switches
• One NAM appliance can receive traffic from multiple Nexus VDCs without re-cabling
• One NAM appliance can collect interface statistics for multiple VDCs
• Dynamic vdc-aware SPAN configuration on Nexus switches using NAM GUI
• Up to 4 NAM ports can be automatically assigned to Nexus VDCs using NAM GUI
• Graph of per-interface ingress and egress statistics for multiple VDCs
• Auto-discovery and bootstrap of NAM appliance from Nexus switch
• Health monitoring of NAM appliance
• Visibility to multiple VDCs from one NAM appliance with ongoing VDC configuration updates
• Configurable timer intervals and VDC list for interface statistics collection
• User-friendly error handling for SPAN creation/deletion/modification
• Order of magnitude OPEX and CAPEX savings: reduction in configuration, simplified provisioning and data-path optimization

Figure 1. RISE Physical and logical topology

Deployment Modes

Cisco RISE supports attachment to the NAM appliance in the following modes:

Direct Attach mode with single NAM: The appliance has a management link that is directly attached to the Nexus switch. Up to 4 data links on the NAM can be attached to one or more VDCs on the Nexus switch to send SPAN traffic (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Direct Attach Mode with single NAM

Direct Attach modes with multiple NAMs: The appliance has a management link that is directly attached to the Nexus switch. Up to 4 data links on each NAM can be attached to one or more VDCs on the Nexus switch to send SPAN traffic (Figure 3).

 

Figure 3: Direct Attach mode with multiple NAMs

Indirect Attach modes with multiple NAMs: The appliance has a management link that is attached via an L2 network to the Nexus switch. Up to 4 data links on each NAM can be attached to one or more VDCs on the Nexus switch to send SPAN traffic (Figure 4).

Core Features

Cisco RISE with NAM provides the following key features that allow the solution to provide traffic and performance analysis across all the VDCs on the Nexus switch without changing the wiring connections.

Dynamic VDC-aware SPAN Configuration

• Configure SPAN sessions for up to 4 NAM dataports from NAM GUI.
• Create, edit, delete SPAN sessions, select destination ports and source ports for the SPAN sessions.
• SPAN sessions can be configured in other VDCs by selecting VDC and data ports from NAM GUI. Dataport will be automatically moved to required VDC.
• The options of SPAN configuration available to N7K CLI users are available via NAM GUI using RISE.
• Provides visibility to all VDCs from one NAM.

Multi-VDC Interface Statistics

• Retrieve interface statistics of all VDCs on N7K via RISE
• Set short term and long term polling intervals for getting interface statistics
• Set the interested list of VDCs from which statistics needs to be retrieved
• Statistics can be viewed on per interface basis as a graph or data points

Main Benefits

• Enhanced application availability via simplified provisioning and efficient manageability.
• Data path optimization: ADC off-load, low latency policy engine.
• Dynamic VDC-aware SPAN configuration: Create SPAN sessions on any VDC
• Multi-VDC awareness: Deliver traffic and performance reports in multiple VDCs
• Cisco RISE provides significant savings in capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx) through simplified provisioning and data-plane optimizations
• Dramatic OpEx savings: Reduction in configuration time and ease of deployment
• Dramatic CapEx savings: Reduced wiring, power, and rack-space needs
• The solution provides enhanced business resiliency and stickiness to Cisco products.
  Ordering Information

Cisco RISE is supported in Cisco NX-OS Software Release 7.x and requires the Enhanced Layer 2 Package license. Please contact nxos-rise@cisco.com if you have any questions.

References

http://cisco.com/go/rise

http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/rise

http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/rise-nam