Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Sheet

Data Sheet

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Updated:June 4, 2024

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The documentation set for this product strives to use bias-free language. For the purposes of this documentation set, bias-free is defined as language that does not imply discrimination based on age, disability, gender, racial identity, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality. Exceptions may be present in the documentation due to language that is hardcoded in the user interfaces of the product software, language used based on RFP documentation, or language that is used by a referenced third-party product. Learn more about how Cisco is using Inclusive Language.

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Updated:June 4, 2024
 

 

Cisco Nexus® Dashboard transforms data-center network operations with simplicity, automation, and analytics.

Product overview

In this era of digital transformation and business resiliency, continuous innovation is critical for organizations to succeed, and experiencing downtime along the way is not an option. Users increasingly demand more features, better usability, reliability, and environmental sustainability from the applications they use.

The network plays a huge role in meeting such demands, and provisioning reliable data-center networking services as fast as possible, when and where organizations need it, is a must. However, network infrastructure management is becoming more complex, diverse, and distributed, with multiple configuration points, monitoring tools, and vast amounts of data generated every second (Figure 1).

Network complexity in a hyper-diverse and hyper-distributed world

Figure 1.               

Network complexity in a hyper-diverse and hyper-distributed world

Having an inconsistent way of configuring, provisioning, and operating the network often leads to human errors, potential security holes, and a reactive break-then-fix model that commonly increases downtime due to manual correlation and endless finger-pointing between teams.

Included with every Cisco Nexus 9000 switch tiered licensing purchase, Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a single focal point to unite the disparate network configurations and views of multiple switches and data centers (Figure 2).

Related image, diagram or screenshot

Figure 2.               

Cisco Nexus Dashboard: powering automation and analytics with a unified, agile, and sustainable networking platform

By providing a single point of management that empowers users to provision and operate their networks across different switches, fabrics, and locations, Cisco Nexus Dashboard is evolving to become one of the simplest ways to provision, monitor, and manage data-center networks.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard unifies multiple services (Figure 3), which enables customers to configure with ease, operate with confidence, and analyze for predictability.

Related image, diagram or screenshot

Figure 3.               

Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform

With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, you get a unified operations view across all your data center fabrics and the services they consume. It scales out based on the size and number of fabrics and the operational services used to manage them.

The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Admin Console (Figure 4) informs the operator of the health of the various clusters, fabrics, and infrastructure services to quickly detect issues and their root cause, allowing users to toggle between the different Cisco Nexus Dashboard services as needed.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Admin Console

Figure 4.               

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Admin Console

Operational infrastructure standardization and toolchain unification directly lead to operational excellence and savings and free up resources for business innovation.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard services

     Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights services are being integrated into the Cisco Nexus Dashboard as native services as part of simplifying the overall consumption experience for our customers. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC) consolidates management for multiple NX-OS‒based switches, bringing automation and monitoring for LAN, EVPN VXLAN, and SAN fabrics. Simply choose an operational mode (LAN, SAN), discover new and/or existing switches, and leverage the benefits of Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP), fabric monitoring, backup, faster provisioning and upgrades, and much more. NDFC supports Cisco (including Cisco Nexus, Catalyst®, and ASR routers) and third-party devices.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller

Figure 5.               

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller

     Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator allows operators to easily interconnect fabrics over any routed network, facilitating data-center migrations, as well as network extension across fabrics. Organizations can also centralize network and policy configurations and set up connectivity at scale. Besides rendering configurations defined in the template(s) to the Cisco ACI data center controller, it enables separation of fault domains, and business resiliency at a global scale. Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator also enables end-to-end change-management workflows, centralized fabric management and upgrades, normalized segmentation, and security policies across the data center, SD-WAN, and enterprise branch and campus networks.

     With Cisco ACI and SDA integrations, common policy is now extended between the data center and the campus branch via SD-WAN. Without SD-WAN, there is a chance of applications experiencing higher latency in the unmanaged connection as the underlay is not coupled tightly with the data center orchestration solution. The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator and SD-WAN integration provides application-aware, SLA-based routing in Cisco SD-WAN, which is used for interconnecting data center sites. For example, the SD-WAN integration provides application-aware SLA-based routing (policy-based path selection and QoS treatment) in the SD-WAN infrastructure used for interconnecting fabrics.

     5G transformations are challenging telecom providers to develop data-center networks of the future that can seamlessly scale, automate, and integrate their infrastructure from the central data center to the edge and across the transport network. This requires the adoption of an end-to-end programmable SDN-enabled approach across data center applications and the service provider’s transport backbone. Orchestrator provides:

    Automation of SR-MPLS policies that can be centrally orchestrated across the 5G telco data center sites (central, regional, and edge data centers)

    Consistent SR-MPLS handoff transport and application slice interworking between 5G telco data center sites and the service provider’s transport backbone

Related image, diagram or screenshot

Figure 6.               

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator automates fabric interconnect sand centralizes network configurations across Cisco ACI

     Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator automates fabric interconnect sand centralizes network configurations across Cisco ACI, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights allows operators to minimize downtime by turning hardware and software telemetry into insights (including anomalies and advisories) to identify potential issues and recommendations to fix them, gathering years of experience under a single network-operations platform. It can also take advantage of its analytics to learn more about sustainability, compliance, changes, and traffic behavior (including flow records, drop, congestion, latency, AI/ML RoCEv2, and more). It also minimizes risk by providing pre- and post-upgrade assistance and can enhance visibility by integrating tools from vendors such as VMware, Splunk, ServiceNow, Panduit, and many more. It incorporates a set of advanced alerting, baselining, correlation, and forecasting algorithms to provide a deep understanding into the behavior of the network. The Insights service and AppDynamics® are tightly integrated to pinpoint exactly where and when an application issue originated from a network perspective.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights monitors network health across Cisco ACI, Cisco NX-OS, and cloud networks

Figure 7.               

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights monitors network health across Cisco ACI and Cisco NX-OS‒based networks

     Third-party applications: Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers an open API model with a rich suite of services for third-party developers to build applications. REST APIs allow third-party tools to authenticate and integrate with key services such as Nexus Dashboard Insights and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator. Currently supported third-party integrations in the Nexus Dashboard ecosystem include ServiceNow ITSM/ITOM, Splunk SIEM, HashiCorp Terraform, and Red Hat Ansible.

Features and benefits

Table 1.           Features and benefits

Feature

Benefit

Single Sign-On (SSO)

Seamless user experience while using Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, Insights, Data Broker, or Orchestrator within one or multiple Nexus Dashboard clusters by integrating LDAP, Radius, or other remote authentication services.

Multifactor authentication

Reduce risk of static passwords and increase security with DUO supported multifactor authentication

Unified operations platform

Clustered, highly available, and scale-out platform infrastructure that includes all services (Insights, Orchestrator, and Fabric Controller) in a single software image*

Minimizes maintenance and lifecycle management vs. siloed operations infrastructure

Single pane of glass to manage the operations infrastructure

A single pane of glass to manage Cisco Nexus Dashboard services and infrastructure

Multi-Cluster support

With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, operators seamlessly consume services they have access to through a single portal, even if they are running on different Nexus Dashboard clusters.

Physical, virtual, and cloud form factors

Deploy Cisco Nexus Dashboard in any form factor—physical, virtual, or cloud*[1]

Cisco Intersight integration

Integrate to Cisco’s cloud operation platform to have access to features like Connected Technical Assistance Center (TAC), Sustainability Energy Sources, advisory updates and many others.

Air-gap support

Customers who can’t connect to the internet can utilize Insights’ advisory features to better identify risks to their infrastructure (including PSIRTs, defects, EoX notices, and field notices).

Prominent features

Seamless operator experience powered by Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Too often the network operations team spends most of its time gathering troubleshooting data to triage and find the root cause an issue. The burden of tying together siloed insights from a fragmented operational toolkit often lies with the operations team. As the company’s data-center footprint extends from the data center across multiple fabrics, and as modern application architectures become the de-facto standard, the operations team needs a unified operations toolchain with a seamless user experience to maintain and operate such complex environments.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard unifies these disparate toolsets and experiences for the operations teams to consume the rich and powerful capabilities of day-2 operations solutions and executes multi-fabric policies from a single pane of glass. Unnecessary handoffs between toolchains and dealing with multiple portals and credentials to get to troubleshooting data and insights have become a thing of the past. Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers a powerful and rich set of capabilities, such as:

     Single Sign-On (SSO): SSO powers the frictionless interaction between one or multiple Cisco Nexus Dashboard clusters and their native services. The operator logs in once and is able to switch seamlessly between services and Cisco APIC.

     Unified operations platform: The Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform is a powerful unified platform capable of scaling out horizontally to accommodate application needs. With a modern microservices infrastructure services stack on a clustered architecture, the same underlying platform can be used to cohost configuration automation capabilities (through Controller and/or Orchestrator) and telemetry/analytics (through Insights), reducing the burden of underlying software and hardware lifecycle maintenance.

     Sustainability: Cisco Nexus Dashboard with Insights provides detailed reports on power consumption, energy sources, and emission rates for your fabrics based on location. Additional integrations with leading power-management vendors such as Panduit deliver new sustainability insights to enable our customers to gain real-time and historical insights into the power consumption of the IT equipment in their data center and estimate the energy footprint of their operations.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights’ Sustainability Report provides a persona-based dashboard giving RBAC-based access to the different services and sections within the Nexus Dashboard platform.

Figure 8.               

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights’ Sustainability Report provides a persona-based dashboard giving RBAC-based access to the different services and sections within the Nexus Dashboard platform

     Common infrastructure services: Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a host of common infrastructure services, such as unified installation and upgrade, authentication domains, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), notification services, and API services.

     Flexible deployment options: Cisco Nexus Dashboard portfolio comprises physical, virtual, and cloud form factors, giving customers unprecedented flexibility while deploying their operations infrastructure and at the same time ensuring a common and unified operator experience through a single pane of glass.

     Programmable infrastructure: Third-party automation tools are critical to improving reporting workflows and responding to issues encountered by distributed workloads. Cisco Nexus Dashboard has integrations with many third-party services such as ServiceNow, one of the most prevalent IT service management platforms. With the ServiceNow integrations, NetOps and DevOps teams can open and track tickets from within Nexus Dashboard. From one portal, operations teams get visibility into the status of open tickets, resulting in the automation of troubleshooting for faster resolutions across fabrics.

     SR-MPLS with Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator: With Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, SR-MPLS policies can be centrally automated across 5G telco data center fabrics (central, regional, and edge data centers). Cisco Nexus Dashboard with Insights and Orchestrator services is the most comprehensive way to automate distributed data centers―overcoming the challenges of managing the infrastructure, applications, and data sources distributed over disparate locations.

With these services integrated in Cisco Nexus Dashboard, NetOps teams can achieve command and control over global network fabrics, optimizing performance and attaining insights into data-center network operations.

Platform support

For detailed platform and compatibility support, refer to: https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/Website/datacenter/day2ops/index.html.

Table 2.           Platform support

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Form factor

Maximum Cluster scale*

Sites supported

Services/Integrations supported

Release 2.2

Physical, virtual, and cloud form factor in cluster

Up to 7 physical

Up to 9 virtual

Cisco ACI, NDFC

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO), Nexus Dashboard Insights, ServiceNow, VMware vCenter

Release 2.3

Physical, virtual, and cloud form factor in cluster

Up to 7 physical

Up to 9 virtual

Cisco ACI, NDFC, public cloud

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO), Nexus Dashboard Insights, ServiceNow, VMware vCenter, AppDynamics, DNS

Release 3.0

Physical, virtual, and cloud form factor in cluster

Up to 7 physical

Up to 9 virtual

ACI, NDFC, public cloud

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO), Nexus Dashboard Insights, Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), ServiceNow, VMware vCenter, AppDynamics, DNS

Release 3.1

Physical, virtual, and cloud form factor in cluster

Up to 7 physical

Up to 9 virtual

ACI, NDFC, NX-OS (standalone), Public Cloud

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO), Nexus Dashboard Insights, Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), VMware vCenter, AppDynamics, DNS, Panduit

Release 3.2

Physical, virtual, and cloud form factor in cluster

Up to 7 physical

Up to 9 virtual

ACI, NDFC, NX-OS (standalone)

Cisco Nexus Dashboard (with built-in services NDFC, NDI and NDO), VMware vCenter, AppDynamics, DNS, Panduit

 

*Active nodes in cluster. Up to 2 physical standby nodes may be added

For exact application versions and services co-hosting requirements, please refer to the compatibility matrix.

Licensing

Cisco Nexus Dashboard software does not require an additional license and it is included with all Cisco Nexus 9000 switch tiered-license purchases. Service and feature access is based on the purchased licensing tier. Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller is offered as part of Cisco Data Center Networking (DCN) Essentials. Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator is offered as part of DCN Advantage. Select Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights features are available in DCN Essentials and DCN Advantage licensing tiers. Previously only DCN Premier customers could access Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights features. This change allows all Cisco Nexus customers to access select Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights features and realize additional use cases and value for each tier.

Related image, diagram or screenshot

Figure 9.               

Tuning the Data Center Networking (DCN) licensing tiers

For a guide to Cisco Nexus Dashboard ordering, please refer to the ordering guide.

Licensing: There are no additional licensing requirements for Cisco Nexus Dashboard. For a guide to ordering, please refer to the ordering guide.

Product specifications

Please refer to the sizing guide for physical and virtual cluster size guidelines.

Table 3.           ND-CLUSTER-L4 (based on Cisco UCS M6 Server) ‒ Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform cluster hardware specifications

Hardware specifications

Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform cluster node specifications

Memory

256 GB

Processors

1

Hard disk

4* 2.4 TB each = 9.6 TB total

SSD

960 GB

NVMe

1.6 TB

Power supply

1050 Watts
1600 Watts

Software

nd-dk9.3.1.1x.iso

Table 4.           Virtual form factor requirements

Hardware specifications

Cisco Nexus Dashboard virtual node specifications

Memory

64 G

Processors

16 vCPUs

Hard disk

550 G application nodes (1536 G SSD/NVME required for Insights)

SSD or NVMe

3 TB for data nodes only

Software

nd-dk9.3.1.1x.qcow2 (KVM)

nd-dk9.3.1.1x.ova (VMware ESXi 6.5/7/8)

Table 5.           Amazon AWS cloud form factor requirements per node of Cisco Nexus Dashboard

AWS native resources

Cisco Nexus Dashboard cloud node specifications

Amazon EC2 Instance Type

m5.4xlarge (recommended), m4.4xlarge

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

100G gp2 SSD, 300G gp2 SSD

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Standard S3 storage

Marketplace link

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-agdixxd5lgi6q

Table 6.           Microsoft Azure cloud form factor requirements per node of Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Microsoft Azure resource name

Resource type

Minimum requirement

Instance type

Compute

Standard_D16s_v3

Azure management disk

Storage

OS disk 50 GB

Azure data disk

Storage

Data disk [250/500 GB]

Virtual networks

Network

2

Static public IP addresses

Network

3

Total public IP addresses (static public IP addresses and dynamic public IP addresses)

Network

3

Network security groups

Network

3

Application security groups

Network

3

Application gateways

Network

1

Virtual machines

Compute

3

Marketplace link

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/cisco.cisco-nexus-dashboard-solution?tab=Overview

Table 7.           Supported site types and integrations on Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Cisco ACI

Cisco NDFC*

Cisco NX-OS (standalone)

Public cloud

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Release 2.2

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Release 2.3

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Release 3.0

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Release 3.1

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Release 3.2

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Insights Release 6.1 on Nexus Dashboard 2.X

Yes

No

No

No

Insights Release 6.2 on Nexus Dashboard 2.X

Yes

Yes

No

No

Insights Release 6.3 on Nexus Dashboard 3.0

Yes

Yes

No

No

Insights on Nexus Dashboard 3.1

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Orchestrator 3.7(2) on Nexus Dashboard 2.X

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Orchestrator 4.1(2) on Nexus Dashboard 2.X

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Orchestrator 4.2 for Nexus Dashboard 3.0

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Orchestrator for Nexus Dashboard 3.1

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

VMware vCenter integration (onboarding)

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

ServiceNow, Splunk

 

All controllers

HashiCorp Terraform, Red Hat Ansible

 

* For Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller details, please consult the corresponding data sheet.

For exact application versions and services co-hosting requirements, please refer to the compatibility matrix.

Table 8.           Ordering information

Part number

Product description

ND-CLUSTER-L4

Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform cluster based on Cisco UCS M6 server

ND-NODE-L4=

Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform node based on Cisco UCS M6 server

ND-UNI-DK9-3.1

Cisco Nexus Dashboard software

ND-VIRTUAL

Cisco Nexus Dashboard virtual platform (OVA, KVM)

Table 9.           Cisco Nexus Dashboard third-party ecosystem

Partner

Integration capability

Applications link

ServiceNow

ServiceNow incident visibility and management on Cisco Nexus Dashboard

ServiceNow App for Cisco Nexus Dashboard*

Splunk

Real-time and historical monitoring (organization-specific KPIs and dashboards), troubleshooting, cross-tier correlation, and alerting automation for Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights App for Splunk

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights Add-on for Splunk

HashiCorp Terraform

Terraform provider to support Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Automation

Terraform Provider for Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Automation

Red Hat Ansible

Ansible module to support Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Automation

Ansible Collection for Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Automation

VMware vCenter

Virtual Machine telemetry and health visibility

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller integration

Panduit

Panduit iPDU monitoring for sustainability, energy consumption, cost and energy sources

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights integration

Warranty information

Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform clusters have a 90-day limited liability warranty.

Cisco environmental sustainability

Information about Cisco’s environmental sustainability policies and initiatives for our products, solutions, operations, and extended operations or supply chain is provided in the “Environment sustainability” section of Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report.

Reference links to information about key environmental sustainability topics (mentioned in the “Environment sustainability” section of the CSR Report) are provided in the following table:

Table 10.       Cisco Nexus Dashboard environmental sustainability

Sustainability topic

Reference

Information on product-material-content laws and regulations

Materials

Information on electronic waste laws and regulations, including products, batteries, and packaging

WEEE Compliance

Reference links to product-specific environmental sustainability information that is mentioned in relevant sections of this data sheet are provided in Table 11.

*Not available for all Nexus Dashboard/Nexus Dashboard Insights versions

Table 11.       Cisco Nexus Dashboard environmental sustainability

Sustainability topic

Reference

General

Eco-design compliance (EU ErP Lot, etc.)

Environmental certifications (EPEAT, Energy Star, etc.)

Table AA. Product compliance

Table BB. Product compliance or Platform features/benefits

Power

Idle, typical, or max product power

Hardware-enabled energy features

Table CC. Product specifications

Table DD. Platform features/benefits

Software-enabled energy features

Power supply information

Power calculator

Table EE. Platform features/benefits

Table FF. Product specifications

Table GG. Product specifications

Material

Unit weight

System weight (product + packaging)

Recycled content

Table HH. Product specifications

Table II. Product specifications

Table JJ. Product specifications

Cisco makes the packaging data available for informational purposes only. It may not reflect the most current legal developments, and Cisco does not represent, warrant, or guarantee that it is complete, accurate, or up to date. This information is subject to change without notice.

Learn more

Power your digital operations transformation with Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Are your operations teams tasked with delivering security, uptime, and business continuity on a complex data center infrastructure? Do they have the right tools that provide proactive change management and precise troubleshooting information tied together in a unified, easy-to-consume user experience? Start powering the transformation of the networking operations teams by standardizing on the Cisco Nexus Dashboard experience. Meet and exceed critical business mandates of agility and availability as you operate your secure, intent-based data center from Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

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Support

As applicable, Cisco will provide support for the product as described here: https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/doing_business/docs/cisco-software-support-service.pdf.

Document history

Table 12.       Document history

New or revised topic

Described in

Date

First draft

 

May 1, 2021

Second draft

 

May 12, 2021

Third draft

 

December 15, 2021

Fourth draft

 

March 14, 2022

Fifth draft

 

May 23, 2023

 

 

 



[1] Only Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator service is currently available on Cisco Nexus Dashboard cloud form factor.
* Single software image available in Nexus Dashboard 3.1 and later.

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