Cisco Cloud Network Automation Provisioner for the Microsoft Cloud Platform-Administrator Portal Guide, Release 2.1

Creating a Network and Virtual Machine Cloud Container Plan

To create a network and virtual machine cloud container plan:

Step 1 On the Tenants Tab screen, click + New in the lower left corner, as shown in the following screen. You can also click PLANS on the main WAP screen.

Figure 4-1 Tenants Tab Screen—Containers

You see a pop-up window with various options for what you can create, as shown in the following screen.

Figure 4-2 Creation Options Screen

Step 2 Click Plan.

You see options to Create Plan and Create Add-On, as shown in the following screen.

Figure 4-3 Plan Creation Options Screen

Step 3 Click Create Plan.

You see a pop-up window, as shown in the following screen.

Figure 4-4 Create a Hosting Plan Screen

Step 4 Enter a name for the plan, then click the right arrow (−>).

You see a pop-up window, as shown in the following screen.

Figure 4-5 Select Services Screen

Step 5 Select Cisco Datacenter Network, then click the right arrow (−>).

You see a pop-up window, as shown in the following screen.

Figure 4-6 Select Add-Ons Screen

Step 6 Click the check mark.

You see a window with the plan you created, which has a Status of Private and a State of Not Configured, as shown in the following screen.

Figure 4-7 Plans Screen

Step 7 Click the name of the plan you just created.

You see the following screen, which displays assorted information about the plan.

Figure 4-8 Plan Detail Screen

Step 8 Under Plan services, click on the name of the plan you’re going to configure. In this example, we click Cisco DataCenter Network.

You see the following screen.

Figure 4-9 Configure Network Container Plan Screen

Step 9 Complete the various fields to create a network container:

• Enter Plan Details about the container:

– Name—Enter a descriptive name for the container.

– Customer Service ID—Used as part of the naming convention that is collected when creating a plan and can also be used to associate subnets with Customer Service IDs.

– Description—Enter a description for the container.

– Maximum Instances per Subscription—1-100

– Maximum Instances per Cloud—1-2500

• Region Selection—Select the region(s) with which the container will be associated.
• Perimeter Router Pair Selection—Select the perimeter router pair from the pull-down menu.
• Specify Container Details:

– Bring Your Own IP Space (BYoIP)—BYoIP allows Tenant administrators to assign their own preferred address space (subnet) to each of the Workload Tiers within a Tenant container. They are isolated from other Container Groups and other Tenants, allowing the Tenant’s Enterprise Network to use the container and access each of the Tiers as per the firewall policy. Each Tier within a Container Group must have its own unique address space (subnet) to prevent conflicts within the container. To function properly the address space must not conflict with the Tenant’s Enterprise Network address space.

Note When Multi-CSR is selected, BYoIP is required and does not have to be selected. When Multi-CSR is not selected, BYoIP is not supported. In this release, Multi-CSR is preselected.

– Type— Zinc Container is supported in the current release.

– Multi CSR— Preselected in this release. For more information, see Types of Container Plans

– WAN Access—Specify the type of WAN Access: MPLS VPN, Site-to-Site VPN, or Internet Access. Remote VPN is not available in the current release.

Note Autoprovision WAN Edge/PE, which provisions the Data Center Provider Edge Router with Tenant VRF and L3VPN configurations, is preselected in this release. For more information, see Understanding the Difference Between Auto-provisioning and Manually Provisioning WAN Gateways in Chapter5, “Managing Container Plans”

– Tiers: Workload and DMZ—Three (3) Workload Tiers and one (1) DMZ Tier are available in the current release.

– High Availability: Perimeter Services and Load Balancer—High Availability for Load Balancer is not available in the current release.

– High Availability:—When configuring service details in a plan, you can select High Availability for Perimeter Services (Cisco CSR 1000V) and Load Balancer (Citrix NetScaler VPX), although in the current release, HA is not supported for Load Balancer; HA is only available for Perimeter Services:

• If High Availability is not checked (non-HA mode), only one network service virtual machine instance is created of the Cisco CSR1000V. The service is still highly available, but an underlying host or OS failure will cause a reboot of the network service virtual machine, interrupting service for seven to 10 minutes.
• If High Availability is checked, two virtual machine instances are created. In this mode, the two network service virtual machines are clustered and have application-level high availability protocols that will quickly restore service when one of the network service virtual machines has an outage due to software crashes or underlying node failures. The outage time to detection and failover is typically in seconds.

IP Addresses are used by the Cisco NSO to communicate over the management interface to these virtual machine instances. Based on your HA selection for Perimeter Services, Cisco CNAP will allocate one or two IP addresses for Perimeter Services. For Load Balancer, Cisco CNAP will allocate only one IP address.

– CSR 1000V License Selection—First select the CSR Feature Set using the pull-down menu, then select the CSR Throughput Level using the pull-down menu. The options available on the CSR Throughput Level pull-down menu depend on what you selected for the CSR Feature Set.

BFD—Bidirectional Forwarding Detection, a network protocol used to detect faults between two forwarding devices connected by a link, is used to ensure that the Cisco CSR 1000V has reachability to specific points in the network. If BFD loses a specific path, traffic can be rerouted to the backup path. If BFD is not configured, a network outage may go unnoticed or extend the time it takes for traffic to re-converge.

Step 10 When you are finished, at the bottom of the screen click Save.

You see a message at the bottom of the screen while the configuration is being saved, as shown in the following screen.

Figure 4-10 Configure Network Container Plan Screen—Update in Progress

Step 11 When the message disappears, click the back arrow (<−) at the top left.

You see the following screen, which shows the plan is now Active and Configured.

Figure 4-11 Plan Detail Screen—Plan Active and Configured

Step 12 As shown at the top, the PLAN IS PRIVATE. To make it public so tenants can subscribe to it, at the bottom of the screen click Change Access and then Public, as shown in the following screen.

Note You can leave the plan Private and then manually assign tenants to the plan.

Figure 4-12 Change Access to Public Screen

Step 13 You see a pop-up asking you to confirm you want the plan to be public, as shown in the following screen. Click Yes.

Figure 4-13 Confirm Public Access Screen

You see a message at the bottom of the screen while the configuration is being saved, as shown in the following screen.

Figure 4-14 Change Access to Public Screen —Update in Progress

When the message disappears, you see the following screen. As shown at the top, now the PLAN IS PUBLIC.

Figure 4-15 Plan is Public Screen

Note that there are no subscriptions since the plan is new and tenants have not yet subscribed to it.

Note If you added a Virtual Machine Cloud plan to a Cisco Datacenter Network plan, then you must first have a container deployed.