• Bridge Domain—The native bridge domain refers to a Layer 2 broadcast domain consisting of a set of physical or Bundle-Ether ports. Data frames are switched within a bridge domain based on the destination MAC address. Multicast, broadcast, and unknown destination unicast frames are flooded within the bridge domain. In addition, the source MAC address learning is performed on all incoming frames on a bridge domain. A learned address is aged out. Incoming frames are mapped to a bridge domain, based on either the ingress port or a combination of both an ingress port and a MAC header field.

  Note	Bridge Domain is supported only on Physical and Bundle main interfaces. No support for sub-interfaces as bridge domain member interfaces.

• Management Plane Protection—Support for In-band Management Plane Protection is added. This feature provides the ability to allow or restrict specific type of management traffic from specific data plane ports.

• Platform Automated Monitoring—Platform Automated Monitoring (PAM) is a system monitoring tool integrated into Cisco IOS XR software image to monitor issues such as process crash, memory leak, CPU hog, tracebacks, syslog and disk usage. When PAM tool detects any of these system issues, it collects the required data to troubleshoot the issue, and generates a syslog message stating the issue. The auto-collected troubleshooting information is then stored in a separate file located at the harddisk:. The files are located at harddisk:/cisco_support/ or at /misc/disk1/cisco_support. PAM is enabled by default on all Cisco IOS XR 64 bit platforms.

  For more information about this feature, see the Implementing Logging Services chapter in System Monitoring Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers. For complete command reference, see the Logging Services Commands chapter in System Monitoring Command Reference for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers.

• DMZ Link Bandwidth—The DMZ link bandwidth of the eBGP link is a community that is advertised to IBGP peers to be used for multipath load balancing. The DMZ Link Bandwidth community is an optional non-transitive attribute, so the community is not advertised to eBGP peers. The DMZ Link Bandwidth feature enables the advertising of the DMZ Link Bandwidth community to an external BGP peer, and also the receiving of the community by an eBGP peer.

  For more information, see the BGP Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, IOS XR Release 6.1.x.

• DHCP Option 82 on Bridge-Group Interface (BVI) Interface—DHCP Option 82 on Bridge-Group Virtual Interface (BVI) Interface provides additional security when DHCP is used to allocate network addresses. It enables the DHCP relay agent to prevent DHCP client requests from untrusted source. You can configure the relay agent to insert the Option 82 circuit ID in the DHCP packet before the relay agent sends the packet to the DHCP server. When the DHCP relay profile is attached to a BVI interface, you can assign the name of the ingress Layer 2 interface as the value of Option 82 circuit ID. The DHCP packet that is sent from the relay agent to the server carries the packet’s ingress Layer 2 interface name as Option 82 circuit ID.

  IPv4 DHCP Server functionality is supported. For DHCP Server running on BVI Interface, a new match criteria for Ingress L2 Interface has been added.

  For more information, see the IP Addresses and Services Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, Release 6.1.x.

• LACP Fallback—The LACP Fallback feature allows an active LACP interface to establish a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) port-channel before the port-channel receives the Link Aggregation and Control Protocol (LACP) protocol data units (PDU) from its peer. With the LACP Fallback feature configured, the router allows the peer node (typically server) to bring up the LAG, before receiving any LACP PDUs from the peer node (typically server), and keeps one port active. This allows the peer node (typically server) to establish L3 connnectivity to download its boot image over one Ethernet port, download its boot image and then continue the booting process. When the peer node boot process is complete, the peer node fully forms an LACP port-channel.

  For more information, see the Interface and Hardware Component Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, IOS XR Release 6.1.x .

• Application Hosting Using Vagrant—Application hosting gives administrators a platform for leveraging their own tools and utilities. By using Vagrant with Cisco IOS XR, you can host native and container-based applications, and develop complex network topologies. Cisco IOS XR supports the use of a Linux-based container, or a docker-based container for hosting applications. In addition to using the IOS XR Linux shell, you can use configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, or Ansible on Vagrant to provision the router running Cisco IOS XR

  For more information, see the Cisco IOS XR Application Hosting Configuration Guide.

• ACL-based LPTS Policers— From this release onward, you can configure Local Packet Transport Services (LPTS) policers based on a specific session without impacting other sessions with same flow. This ACL-based LPTS feature allows you to specify different police rates based on prefixes.

  For information about configuration procedures, see the Implementing LPTS section in the IP Addresses and Services Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, Release 6.1.x.

  For information about the commands, see the LPTS Commands section in the IP Addresses and Services Command Reference Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, Release 6.1.x.

• Ethernet Connectivity Fault Management (CFM)—Ethernet Connectivity Fault Management (CFM) is a service-level OAM protocol that provides tools for monitoring and troubleshooting end-to-end Ethernet services per VLAN. This includes proactive connectivity monitoring, fault verification, and fault isolation. CFM uses standard Ethernet frames and can be run on any physical media that is capable of transporting Ethernet service frames. Unlike most other Ethernet protocols which are restricted to a single physical link, CFM frames can transmit across the entire end-to-end Ethernet network.

  CFM is defined in this standard protocol:

  • IEEE 802.1ag—Defines the core features of the CFM protocol.

• BGP Label-Unicast—When BGP is used to distribute a particular route, it can be also be used to distribute a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) label which is mapped to that route. This feature enables BGP UPDATE message to include MPLS label mapping information about a particular prefix.

  For more information, see the BGP Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, IOS XR Release 6.1.x.

• BGP Link-State—BGP Link-State (LS) is an Address Family Identifier (AFI) and Sub-address Family Identifier (SAFI) defined to carry interior gateway protocol (IGP) link-state database through BGP. BGP LS delivers network topology information to topology servers and Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) servers. BGP LS allows policy-based control to aggregation, information-hiding, and abstraction. BGP LS supports IS-IS and OSPFv2.

  For more information, see the BGP Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, IOS XR Release 6.1.x.

• IRB Unicast—IRB provides the ability to route between a bridge group and a routed interface using a BVI. The BVI is a virtual interface within the router that acts like a normal routed interface. A BVI is associated with a single bridge domain and represents the link between the bridging and the routing domains on the router. To support receipt of packets from a bridged interface that are destined to a routed interface, the BVI must be configured with the appropriate IP addresses and relevant Layer 3 attributes.

  Note	IRB interface statistics are not supported. IRB is supported only on Physical and Bundle main interfaces. No support for sub-interfaces as bridge domain member interfaces.

  For more information, see Interface and Hardware Component Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, IOS XR Release 6.1.x

• Segment Routing Egress Peer Engineering (EPE)—Segment routing egress peer engineering (EPE) uses a controller to instruct an ingress provider edge or a content source within the segment routing domain to use a specific egress provider edge and a specific external interface to reach a destination. BGP peer SIDs are used to express source-routed inter-domain paths. Controllers learn BGP peer SIDs and the external topology of the egress border router through BGP-LS EPE routes. EPE functionality is only required at EPE egress border router and EPE controller.

• Bidirectional forwarding detection (BFD)—BFD provides low-overhead, short-duration detection of failures in the path between adjacent forwarding engines. BFD allows a single mechanism to be used for failure detection over any media and at any protocol layer, with a wide range of detection times and overhead. The fast detection of failures provides immediate reaction to failure in the event of a failed link or neighbor.

  Note	BFD is supported only on NCS 5001 and 5002 chassis. Only BFD single-hop for IPv4 is supported.

  For more information, see IP Addresses and Services Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, Release 6.1.x

• Enhancement to Telemetry—Streaming telemetry lets users direct data to a configured receiver for analysis and troubleshooting purposes in order to maintain the health of the network.

  The enhancements to Telemetry includes support for:

  • Model-driven telemetry (MDT) that provides a mechanism to stream data from an MDT-capable device to a destination. The data to be streamed is driven through subscription from a dataset in a YANG model. The data from the subscribed dataset is streamed out to the destination at a configured interval.

  • Policy-based telemetry provides enhanced time stamping functionality.

  • Additional options for transport and encoding to include key-value GPB encoding using GPB over TCP. These options are also extended to JSON encoder.

  • Whitelist entries in the policy files to explicitly specify a list of fields to include in the streamed output.

  • An improved GPB workflow where the need to generate the .map file is eliminated.

  • A cadence from 30s to 10s to stream telemetry data; thus improving the performance.

  To get started with streaming telemetry data, see Cisco IOS XR Telemetry Configuration Guide.

• Enhancement to Data Models—Data models are a programmatic and standards-based way of configuring and collecting operational data of a network device, replacing the process of manual configuration.

  The enhancements to Data Models includes support for:

  • Flexible CLI group and apply-group configuration can be created using NETCONF YANG client. The flexible CLI configuration groups provide the ability to minimize repetitive configurations by defining a series of configuration statements in a configuration group, and then applying this group to multiple hierarchical levels in the router configuration tree.

  • Additional Cisco-specific and native models.

  • Open Config Data Models (OC MPLS, OC IF (3 sub models), OC BGP and RPL). In this release OC MPLS configuration is supported but Operational node support is not available in this release.

  • External models through the Manageability Mapping Infrastructure (eMMI) infrastructure.

  • IOS-XR manageability interfaces to access the admin plane data.

  To get started with using data models, see the Obtain Data Models section in Cisco IOS XR Data Model Configuration Guide for the NCS 5000 Series Router.

• Zero Touch Provisioning—Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) supports auto provisioning of router by running customized scripts using DHCP server.

  The enhancements to ZTP support includes:

  • Running ZTP scripts within the global VPN routing/forwarding (VRF) namespace and thus supporting line card interfaces.

  • Configuring and bringing up the interfaces, and invoking ZTP manually.

  For more information about ZTP, see the Perform Disaster Recovery section in the System Setup and Software Installation Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, IOS XR Release 6.1.x

• L3VPN (Layer 3 Virtual Private Network) features:

  • Support of all types of interfaces (such as physical, physical-sub-interface, bundle and bundle-sub-interface)

  • OSPFv2, ISIS, RIPv4 as IGP protocols

  • LDPv4, Segment Routing (SR) as MPLS core

  • OSPFv2, RIPv4, e-BGP, Static routes as edge protocol (between PE and CE)

  For more information, see L2VPN and Ethernet Services Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, IOS XR Release 6.1.x

• Multicast features:

  • PIM SM—Protocol Independent Multicast in sparse mode (PIM-SM) is used between routers to track which multicast packets to forward to each other and to their directly connected LANs.

    • Auto RP—Automates the distribution of RP information in a multicast network.

    • Static RP—Ability to statically configure an RP for a multicast group range.

  • PIM SSM—Protocol Independent Multicast in Source-Specific Multicast (PIM-SSM) has the ability to report interest in receiving packets from specific source addresses (or from all but the specific source addresses), to an IP multicast address.

  • IGMP—IGMPv2/IGMPv3 is used between hosts on a LAN and the routers on that LAN to track the multicast groups of which hosts are members.

  • Multicast Nonstop Forwarding—Nonstop forwarding (NSF) feature for multicast packet forwarding helps alleviating network failures, or software upgrades and downgrades.

• IPv6 Entries in Access Control Lists and Prefix Lists—From this release onward, you can create IPv6 access control entries (ACE) in access control lists (ACL) and prefix lists. The ACEs collectively define the network traffic profile. This profile can then be referenced by Cisco IOS XR software features such as traffic filtering, route filtering, QoS classification, and access control.

  For information, see IP Addresses and Services Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, Release 6.1.x.

• HSRP and VRRP—They are an IP routing redundancy protocol designed to allow for transparent failover at the first-hop IP router. VRRP is supported on 1G, 10G, 40G, 100G interfaces and Bundle Ethernet interfaces.

  HSRP and VRRP is supported on Physical and Bundle sub-interfaces as well.

  VRRP is not supported over BVI interface.

  For information, see IP Addresses and Services Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, Release 6.1.x.

• DHCP Relay Agents—The DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 relay agent is a host that forwards DHCP packets between clients and servers that do not reside on a shared physical subnet. Relay agent forwarding is distinct from the normal forwarding of an IP router where IP datagrams are switched between networks transparently.

  For information, see IP Addresses and Services Configuration Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers, Release 6.1.x.

In this release, a new system, Cisco NCS 5011 is introduced for the Cisco NCS 5000 Series routers. Cisco NCS 5011 router consists of 32 QSFP+/QSFP 28 ports. The NCS 5011 system supports 10 GE in break-out fashion, 40 GE and 100 GE.

NCS 5011, supports 4*10G on the 100G port.

For more information on NCS 5011 router, see Hardware Installation Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers

Supported Hardware

For a complete list of supported optics, hardware and ordering information for NCS 5001 and NCS 5002 series router, see the Cisco NCS 5000 Series Data Sheet

For a complete list of supported optics, hardware and ordering information for NCS 5011 router, see the Cisco NCS 5011 Series Data Sheet

To install the Cisco NCS 5000 series routers, see Hardware Installation Guide for Cisco NCS 5000 Series Routers.

RP/0/RP0/CPU0:router# show version
Cisco IOS XR Software, Version 6.1.2
Copyright (c) 2013-2016 by Cisco Systems, Inc.

Build Information:
 Built By     : <username>
 Built On     : Thu Nov 10 22:15:54 PST 2016
 Build Host   : iox-lnx-031
 Workspace    : /auto/srcarchive11/production/6.1.2/ncs5k/workspace
 Version      : 6.1.2
 Location     : /opt/cisco/XR/packages/

cisco NCS-5001 () processor
System uptime is 1 day, 7 hours, 38 minutes

Log in to the router and enter show fpd package command in Admin mode:

For NCS 5001

RP/0/RP0/CPU0:router(admin)# show fpd package
 
                                                                   FPD Versions
                                                                ===============
Location  Card type         HWver FPD device       ATR Status   Run    Programd
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0/RP0     NCS5001           2.0   BIOS                 CURRENT    1.09    1.09
0/RP0     NCS5001           2.0   IOFPGA               CURRENT    0.17    0.17

For NCS 5002

RP/0/RP0/CPU0:router(admin)# show fpd package

                                                                   FPD Versions
                                                                ===============
Location  Card type         HWver FPD device       ATR Status   Run    Programd
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0/RP0     NCS-5002          3.0   BIOS                 CURRENT    1.09    1.09
0/RP0     NCS-5002          3.0   IOFPGA               CURRENT    0.17    0.17

For NCS 5011

RP/0/RP0/CPU0:router(admin)# show fpd package

                                                                   FPD Versions
                                                                ===============
Location  Card type         HWver FPD device       ATR Status   Run    Programd
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0/RP0     NCS-5011          1.0   BIOS                 CURRENT    1.09    1.09
0/RP0     NCS-5011          1.0   IOFPGA               CURRENT    0.02    0.02