Introduction
Cisco Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (Cisco NFVI) provides the virtual layer and hardware environment in which virtual network functions (VNFs) operate. VNFs provide a well-defined network function that offers routing, intrusion, detection, Domain Name Service (DNS), caching, Network Address Translation (NAT), and other network functions. While the network functions required a tight integration between a network software and hardware in the past, VNFs decouple the software from the underlying hardware.
Cisco NFVI 3.2.0 is based on the Queens release of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources. The Cisco version of OpenStack is Cisco Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (Cisco VIM). Cisco VIM manages the OpenStack compute, network, and storage services, and all Cisco NFVI build and control functions.
Key roles of Cisco NFVI pods are:
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Control (including Networking)
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Computes
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Storage
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Management, logging, and monitoring
Hardware that is used to create the Cisco NFVI pods include:
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Cisco UCS® C240 M4 or C240 M5 or C220 M5—Performs management and storage functions, and services. Includes dedicated Ceph (UCS 240-M4 or UCS 240-M5) distributed object store and the file system. (Only Red Hat Ceph is supported).
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Cisco UCS C220/240 M4 or M5 —Performs control and compute services.
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HP DL 360 Gen9: Supports as a third-party Compute, where the control plane is still Cisco UCS servers.
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Cisco UCS B200 M4 blades—It can be used instead of the UCS C220 for compute and control services. The B200 blades and C240 Ceph server are joined with redundant Cisco Fabric Interconnects that are managed by UCS Manager.
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Combination of M5 series servers are supported in micro-pod and VIC/NIC (40G) based Hyper-converged and Micro-pod offering.
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Quanta servers as an alternate to Cisco UCS servers: Use of specific Quanta servers for the installation of the cloud both at the core and edge. Automated installation of the Central Ceph cluster on the edge pod is supported for Glance image services.
The UCS C240 and C220 servers are M4/M5 Small Form Factor (SFF) models where the operating systems boots from HDD/SDD for control nodes and compute nodes, and from internal SSD for Ceph nodes. Cisco supports pure Intel NIC configuration and Cisco 40G VIC with Intel NIC configuration.
Software applications that manage Cisco NFVI hosts and services include:
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 with OpenStack Platform 13.0—Provides the core operating system with OpenStack capability. RHEL 7.6 and OSP 13.0 are installed on all Cisco NFVI UCS servers.
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Cisco VIM—An OpenStack orchestration system that helps to deploy and manage an OpenStack cloud offering from bare metal installation to OpenStack services, considering the hardware and software redundancy, security, and monitoring. Cisco VIM includes OpenStack Queens release with more features and usability enhancements that are tested for functionality, scale, and performance.
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Cisco Unified Management—Deploys, provisions, and manages Cisco VIM on Cisco UCS servers. Also, provides UI to manage multiple pods when installed on a dedicated server Unified Management node.
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Cisco VIM Monitor— Used to provide integrated monitoring and alerting of the NFV Infrastructure layer.
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Cisco UCS Manager—Used to perform certain management functions when UCS B200 blades are installed.
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Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC)—When installing Cisco VIM, Cisco IMC 2.0(13i) or later is supported but certain IMC versions are recommended and listed in the below table.
For the Cisco IMC 2.0 lineup, the recommended version information is as follows:
UCS-M4 servers
Recommended: Cisco IMC 2.0(13n) or later.
For the Cisco IMC 3.x lineup, the recommended version is as follows:
UCS-M4 servers
Cisco IMC versions are 3.0(3a) or later, except for 3.0(4a). Recommended: Cisco IMC 3.0(4d). Extended support of 4.0(1a), 4.0(1b), and 4.0(1c).
UCS-M5 servers
Recommended to stay with Cisco IMC 3.1(2b). Ensure that you do not use 3.1(3c) through 3.1(3h).
Extended support of CIMC 4.0(1a) and 4.0(1c)
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Cisco Virtual Topology System (VTS)— VTS is a standard-based, open, overlay management and provisioning system for data center networks. It automates DC overlay fabric provisioning for physical and virtual workloads.
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Cisco Virtual Topology Forwarder (VTF)—Includes VTS, VTF leverages Vector Packet Processing (VPP) to provide high performance Layer 2 and Layer 3 VXLAN packet forwarding.
Layer 2 networking protocols include:
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VXLAN supported using Linux Bridge
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VTS VXLAN supported using ML2/VPP
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VLAN supported using Open vSwitch (OVS)
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VLAN supported using ML2/VPP. It is supported only on Intel NIC.
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VLAN supported using ML2/ACI
For pods that are based on UCS B-Series pods, and pods based on C-series with Intel NIC Single Root I/O Virtualization (SRIOV), the SRIOV allows a single physical PCI Express to be shared on a different virtual environment. The SRIOV offers different virtual functions to different virtual components, for example, network adapters, on a physical server.
You can use any connection protocol unless you install UCS B200 blades with the UCS Manager plugin, in which case, only OVS over VLAN can be used.
If you use VIC only, the VPP is not supported and the B-series is limited to OVS.
Features of Cisco VIM 3.2.0
Cisco VIM is the only standalone fully automated cloud lifecycle manager offered from Cisco for the private cloud. The current version of Cisco VIM, integrates with Cisco C or B-series UCS servers and Cisco or Intel NIC. This document and its accompanying administrator and install guides help the cloud administrators to set up and manage the private cloud.
The following are the features of Cisco VIM:
Feature Name |
Comments |
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OpenStack Version |
RHEL 7.6 with OSP 13 (Queens) * |
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Hardware Support Matrix |
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NIC support |
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POD Type |
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ToR and FI support |
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Install or update mode |
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IPV6 support for management network |
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Mechanism Drivers |
OVS/VLAN, Linuxbridge/VXLAN, ACI/VLAN, VPP/VLAN (Fast Networking, Fast Data FD.io > VPP/VLAN, based on the FD.io VPP fast virtual switch).
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SDN controller integration |
VTS 2.6.2.1 with optional feature of Managed VTS; ACI (ships in the night or with Unified ACI Plugin) 4.0.1 with Cisco VIC or Intel NIC on the UCS C-series M4/M5 platform. |
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Scale |
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Automated pod life cycle management |
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Platform security |
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Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA) |
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HA and reliability |
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Unified Management (UM) Support |
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Central logging |
ELK integrated with external syslog (over v4 or v6) for a log offload, with optional support of NFS with ELK snapshot. |
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External syslog servers |
Support of multiple external syslog servers over IPv4 or IPv6. The minimum and maximum number of external syslog server that is supported is 1 and 3, respectively. |
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VM migration |
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Storage |
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Monitoring |
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Optional OpenStack Features |
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Support of External Auth System |
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Software update |
Update of Cloud software for bug fixes on the same release. |
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Software upgrade |
Software upgrade of non-VTS cloud from Cisco VIM 3.0.0 to Cisco VIM 3.2.0.* |
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CIMC upgrade capability |
Central management tool to upgrade the CIMC bundle image of one or more servers. |
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VPP port mirroring |
Ability to trace or capture packets for debugging and other administrative purposes. |
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VXLAN extension into the cloud |
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Technical support for CIMC |
Collection of technical support for CIMC. |
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Enable TTY logging as an option |
Enables TTY logging and forwards the log to external syslog server and ELK stack running on management node. Optionally, it forwards the log to remote syslog if that option is available. |
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Automated enablement of Intel X710/XL710 NIC's PXE configuration on Cisco UCS-C series |
Utility to update Intel X710/XL710 NIC's PXE configuration on Cisco UCS-C series. |
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Power management of computes |
Option to selectively turn OFF or ON the power of computes to conserve energy. |
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Disk maintenance for pod nodes |
Ability to replace faulty disk(s) on the Pod node(s) without the need for add/remove/replace node operation. |
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Support of workload types |
Extending Cisco VIM to support baremetal (ironic based) and container (Cisco Container Platform (CCP) as tech-preview) based workloads |
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Cloud adaptation for low latency workload |
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Integrated test tools |
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![]() Note |
The features specific for Cisco VIM 3.2.0 are indicated by *. |
Known Caveats
The following list describes the known caveats in Cisco VIM 3.2.0:
- CSCve39684
- Translation of vic_slot from 7 to MLOM fails in CIMC 2.0(13i) version.
- CSCva37451
- Traffic loss of 8 to 10 seconds is seen, when the active l3 agents are rebooted.
- CSCva36943
- Volume-attach failure errors are to be reported to the user.
- CSCva36914
- When a MariaDB HA event is logged, you should run the recovery playbook.
- CSCva36907
- Nova-compute service is down for up to two minutes, after a controller reboot.
- CSCva36782
- Nova HA: VM is stuck in scheduling state, while conducting HA on Nova conductor.
- CSCva32195
- Auto-created Layer 3 network is not cleaned up with the router or tenant deletion.
- CSCva32312
- Update fails, if compute is not reachable even after updating the containers on the controller node.
- CSCva34476
- Nova API is unavailable for few minutes, once the controller is down.
- CSCva32193
- The ARP entry on ToR does not get refreshed, which results in the failure of the Layer 3 ping to VM FIP.
- CSCva57121
- The Ceph cluster are not set to error state, when all the storage nodes are down.
- CSCva66093
- Rollback not supported for repo update failure.
- CSCvf81055
- VMs intermittently goes to 'SHUTOFF' state, after compute node reboot.
- CSCve13042
- Recovery play book needs to handle ceph recovery after power outage.
- CSCve76157
- Performance issue on IE browser.
- CSCvf74264
- Insight UI: The pod users cannot update the REST API password once it is changed.
- CSCvf86622
- When using mechanism-driver, ACI which is the command-line interface for neutron quota-update does not get enforced.
- CSCvf86623
- When using mechanism-driver, ACI and VMs originally in an active state on the compute node are unable to acquire an IP address from DHCP.
- CSCvi98399
- Representation of the service-type such as cloud-formation in OpenStack endpoint needs to be changed.
- CSCvj32012
- Virtual disk creation fails due to the busy state of the physical disk.
- CSCvm95598
- DHCP agent should be moved to new controller, when DHCP port attached controller is rebooted.
Using the Cisco Bug Search Tool
You can use the Bug Search Tool to search for a specific bug or to search for all bugs in a release.
Procedure
Step 1 |
Go to the Cisco Bug Search Tool. |
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Step 2 |
In the Log In screen, enter your registered Cisco.com username and password, and then click Log In. The Bug Search page opens.
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Step 3 |
To search for a specific bug, enter the bug ID in the Search For field and press Enter. |
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Step 4 |
To search for bugs in the current release: |
Related Documentation
The Cisco VIM documentation set consists of:
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Cisco Virtualized Infrastructure Manager Installation Guide
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Cisco Virtualized Infrastructure Manager Administrator Guide
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Cisco Virtualized Infrastructure Manager Release Notes
These documents are available at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/cloud-systems-management/virtualized-infrastructure-manager/tsd-products-support-series-home.html
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
For information on obtaining documentation, submitting a service request, and gathering additional information, see the monthly What’s New in Cisco Product Documentation, which also lists all new and revised Cisco technical documentation, at: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/general/whatsnew/whatsnew.html
Subscribe to the What’s New in Cisco Product Documentation as an RSS feed and set content to be delivered directly to your desktop using a reader application. The RSS feeds are a free service. Cisco currently supports RSS Version 2.0.
External References
Cisco VIM documentation is available at: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/cloud-systems-management/virtualized-infrastructure-manager/tsd-products-support-series-home.html