Measuring Network Performance by Hosting on the Cisco Catalyst 9300 Switch

Get intelligence at the edge

Powered by an x86 CPU, the application hosting solution on Cisco Catalyst 9000 series switches provides the intelligence required at the edge. This gives administrators a platform for leveraging their own tools and utilities, such as a security agent, Internet of Things (IoT) sensor, and traffic monitoring agent.

Application hosting on Cat9k opens opportunities for innovation

Application hosting on Cisco Catalyst 9000 family switches opens up new opportunities for innovation by converging network connectivity with a distributed application runtime environment, including hosting applications developed by partners and developers.
Cisco IOS XE 16.12.1 introduced native Docker container support on Catalyst 9300 series switches. Now, C9404 and C9407 models also can support Docker containers with the Cisco IOS XE 17.1.1 release. With this support:

Users can build and bring their own applications without additional packaging.
Developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel by rewriting the applications every time there is an infrastructure change.
Applications will work within any infrastructure that supports docker containers, once packaged within Docker.

Join me for a live webinar on February 25th — we’ll cover the step-by-step guide to hosting native docker applications on Cisco Catalyst 9000 application environment. We will walk through application networking, application resources profiles, and IOS level configuration required to install applications on IOS-XE with Cisco Catalyst 9K switches. We will also cover application orchestration via Cisco DNA Center.

This step-by-step installation configuration guide shows you how you can use the native docker image (iperf), from Docker Hub, to measure network performance by hosting on Cisco Catalyst 9300 switches. The guide takes you through the steps to execute the following:

Download the iPerf Docker image to the local laptop.
Login to the Catalyst 9300 and copy the iPerf.tar archive to the flash: drive.
Configure network connectivity to the IPerf docker.
a. Create the VLAN and VLAN interface:
b. Configure the AppGigabitEthernet1/0/1 interface:
c. Map vNIC interface eth0 of the IPerf docker to VLAN 123 on the AppGigabitEthernet 1/0/1 interface:
Enable and verify App Hosting.
a. Verify that the USB SSD-120G flash storage is used.
b. Configure iox for App Hosting:
Install ,activate and run the IPerf docker cat9k application.
a. Deploy the IPerf docker application:
b. Activate the IPerf docker application:
c. Start the IPerf docker application:
d. Verify that the IPerf docker application is running:
Working with the app.
a. Check app details.
b. Check app utilization.
Monitoring performance between the laptop and C9300.