New and Changed Information

New and Changed Information

The following table provides an overview of the significant changes to this guide for this current release. The table does not provide an exhaustive list of all changes made to the guide or of the new features in this release.

The following tables provide information about the new and changed features in Cisco NDFC.

Table 1. New and Enhanced features for all personas in NDFC Release 12.1.2e
Product Impact Features Description Where documented
Ease of Use Disable Promiscuous mode for virtual Nexus Dashboard (vND) deployments From Release 12.1.2e, you can disable promiscuous mode on port groups associated with the vND management and data interface vNICs. All features that use persistent IP will continue to work even for Layer-2 adjacent vND deployments.

ESXi Networking for Promiscuous Mode
Elasticsearch to Open Search database From Release 12.1.2e, NDFC uses an OpenSearch database for storing time series data. As part of the upgrade process from prior NDFC releases, data is seamlessly migrated from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch.

NA
Inline Backup Restore This feature enables you to perform a config-only restore on an existing NDFC system using a prior backup. The backup itself may be a full backup or a config-only backup. In prior releases, a restore from a backup file, could only be performed on a freshly installed NDFC, with no persona enabled. Now you can also restore the backup on an In-Service system where some persona has already been enabled.

Restore
Interoperability NDFC with Nexus Dashboard QCOW2 deployments on KVM hypervisor on RHEL Release 8.6 NDFC can be installed on a virtual Nexus Dashboard cluster running on top of KVM hypervisor running on top of CentOS and RHEL operating systems. All 3 personas namely, Fabric Controller, Fabric Discovery, and SAN Controller are supported.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Deployment Guide
Performance and Scalability Resource Utilization for MinIO and CockroachDB NDFC Release 12.1.2e uses CockroachDB which is a distributed SQL database primarily for configuration data. It uses MinIO as an object store for storing blob files like switch images, patches, and so on. Both CockroachDB and MinIO export statistics that are collected and made available on Nexus Dashboard Web UI > Infrastructure > Resource Utilization, dashboards namely, CockroachDB and Minio Overview.

NA
Licensing NDFC Licensing for 3rd Party Devices NDFC licenses for 3rd party devices will be supported in the DCN 3rd Party Essentials License tier. Customers can now purchase the DCN 3rd Party Essentials for Arista devices onboarded into NDFC.

Smart Licensing
Table 2. New and Enhanced features in SAN Fabrics in Cisco NDFC Release 12.1.2e
Product Impact Feature Description Where documented
Interoperability Support for NDFC with Nexus Dashboard on RHEL 8.6 From Release 12.1.2e, NDFC is supported with Nexus Dashboard deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.6 version. NDFC SAN Controller is supported with without SAN Insights.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Deployment Guide
Performance and Scalability Enhancements to SAN Insights

  • Enhanced scale supports up to 1M ITLs/ITNs.

  • You can modify, activate, or utilize data of SAN Insights anomaly policies which are in inactive state.

  • VM information from VMware vCenter discovery is combined with SAN Insight Data to provide end-to-end visibility from VM to LUNs.

Cisco NDFC Verified Scalability Guide
Ease of Use Enhancements to Zoning

  • From Release 12.1.2e, you can click Topology icon next to the Zone name to view Zone Topology. The topology is displayed in a hierarchical left-right layout by default.

  • A column is introduced to display the port status.

Zones
Ease of Use FC Name Server Name Server stores name entries for all hosts in the FCNS database. The Name Server tab displays name server entries for the selected Fabric. Note that this data is pulled from the Switches discovery, and therefore, the duplicate entries are removed.

Name Server
Ease of Use DIRL Congestion management enhancements

  • From Release 12.1.2e, DIRL is supported with NPV switches also.

  • DIRL specifies the interface on which the analysis is collected. You can view the trend, which provides information about Ingress, Egress, DIRL counter(s) values of the current DIRL with event timestamps for the selected DIRL interface.

DIRL Congestion Management Visualization
Ease of Use Host and Storage Dashboard display discovery source information On the Host and Storage Dashboards, a new icon is introduced next to the host name and storage name that displays the type of discovery. It displays if the enclosure is from a VMware vCenter or storage or FC discovery.
Ease of Use Configuration Drift A new monitoring job is executed daily to check for differences in baseline configuration and current configuration. Configuration Drift feature displays Yes when there is a difference between baseline and current configuration and an appropriate alarm is raised.

Configuration Monitor
Ease of Use UCS discovery From Release 12.1.2e, NDFC allows you to discover switches using UCS credentials.

Adding a Fabric