IP Address Managment and the Cloud: Cisco IAC now integrates with Cisco Prime for Service Providers and Enterprise

IP Address Management and the Cloud is a topic that requires solution architecture for every cloud deployment.  While Cisco IA for Cloud has a basic in-built IPAM system out of the box, often times we find customers need one of the worlds highest  scale IPAM solutions.   Cisco’s  Prime Network Registrar is one such product in this category.

The follow blog is from our guest Blogger, Jim Kao of the Cloud & Systems Management Technology Group Product Management team.

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) is a cloud management platform for Enterprise IT or Service Providers to build cloud services, such as IaaS. You can learn more about it here. The IAC solution supports a customer’s cloud journey by providing a solution that is extensible, scalable and easy to use in order to help them reduce the operation costs, optimize their resource utilization and efficiency.

One of the areas that are critical to customer’s infrastructure growth is IP Address Management (IPAM.) This is especially critical to large enterprise or service providers who need a scalable and extensible IPAM solution. Cisco Prime IPAM is the solution that provides strong IPAM management capability as described in Jamie Lerner’s blog.  With these two best of breed products both coming from Cisco and both aiming to give customers scalable management solutions, it makes perfect sense to build integration between the two products. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce an integration recently made available by our engineering team to integrate CIAC and Cisco Prime IPAM. This integration will be made available to customers as part of the latest release of IAC, 3.1.1.

To explain what we have done, the following figure shows the high level end-to-end use case:

In this use case, it starts with a user ordering a virtual machine from a cloud built with Cisco IAC. This order is handled through the Cisco Cloud Portal (CCP) and Cisco Process Orchestrator (CPO). In the case where a customer has Cisco Prime IPAM, IAC will obtain an IP Address from the Cisco Prime IPAM.  Before IAC invokes the API to acquire an IP address, the Prime IPAM shows the first available IP address is 192.168.10.9, as shown in the following figure:

The picture below shows that the orchestration flow in CPO chooses the “External” path. This is configured during the deployment of this IAC/IPAM integration package. CPO will then access an external IPAM system to acquire an IP address. It also shows the details of the sub process “Get IP Address >> User Defined” which makes the SOAP API call.

In the figure below, you can see the IP address retrieved is 192.168.10.9, which is the first available IP address in Cisco Prime IPAM.

The Cisco Prime IPAM also updated the status of this IP address (.9) to “Static” to reflect the assignment and also recorded the hostname (coke-vm-6) as shown below.

As you can see Cisco IAC is now integrated with Cisco Prime IPAM. For customers who already have Cisco Prime IPAM and are building a cloud using Cisco IAC, they can easily deploy this integration to leverage their existing investment in their IPAM solution. This is one of the first integration built between IAC and Prime product family. It is likely that more integration between IAC and other Prime products will be made available in the near future.