Cisco Cisco DWDM Transceiver Modules White Paper
© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Bash Shell Access and Linux Container Support
Network operators in DevOps environments and modern enterprise data centers endeavor to use the
comprehensive tool and scripting capabilities developed for the computing environment on network devices. To
support our customers, Cisco has enabled support for direct Linux shell access and for Linux containers. With
Linux shell access, customers can access the underlying Linux system on the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches
to use the Linux commands with which they are familiar and to manage the underlying system (Figure 17).
Customers can also use support for Linux containers to install their own software in a relatively secure fashion to
enhance the capabilities of the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series.
Figure 16. Bash Access to Cisco NX-OS on the Supervisor and on Line Cards
Customers, for example, are installing bare-metal provisioning tools such as Cobbler on Cisco Nexus 9000 Series
devices to enable automatic provisioning of bare-metal servers from the ToR switch.
Conclusion
Modern data centers require a highly available network that provides the bandwidth and service guarantees
required by organizations and their applications. In addition to performance and resiliency characteristics, modern
networks need to support several new capabilities: automated provisioning and monitoring of network resources,
programmatic access to statistics and events to enable end-to-end visibility, and RBAC and policy management.
The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series is powered by enhanced Cisco NX-OS, an open, Linux-based, modern operating
system. The switches expose a comprehensive set of automation and programmability features to meet the
requirements of data center operations teams. The capabilities are comprehensive in both their breadth, with
support for a wide variety of technologies (commercial and OSS), and depth, with comprehensive automation
features and APIs. They enable a wide variety of use cases (Table 2).