Cisco Cisco Prime Infrastructure 3.0 White Paper

 

 

© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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If you have an Assurance add-on license, you will be able to get an aggregated view from all the data sources in 

your network as shown in the following figure: 

 

As we can see, Cisco Prime Infrastructure polls some of the devices using Simple Network Management Protocol 

(SNMP), and collects NetFlow from other data sources directly. In case of Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module 

(NAM), Cisco Prime Infrastructure collects all the information from the NAM natively. However, the NetFlow 

Generation Appliance (NGA) sends NetFlow to Cisco Prime Infrastructure. Routers and switches capable of 

NetFlow and medianet can be enabled and configured by Cisco Prime Infrastructure to get application visibility for 

the ones that flow through them. 

Installation 

The Cisco Prime Infrastructure software runs on either a dedicated Cisco Prime Appliance (PRIME-NCS-APL-K9) 

or on qualified server running VMware ESX/ESXi. The Cisco Prime Infrastructure software image does not support 

the installation of any other packages or applications on this dedicated platform. The Cisco Prime Infrastructure 

application comes preinstalled on a physical appliance with various performance characteristics. 

Cisco Prime Infrastructure runs on a 64-bit, Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server 5.4 operating system. You cannot 

install Cisco Prime Infrastructure on a standalone operating system such as Red Hat Linux, as Cisco Prime 

Infrastructure is shipped as a physical or virtual appliance that comes preinstalled with a secure and hardened 

version of Red Hat Linux as its operating system. 

Cisco Prime Infrastructure has two deployment options: Virtual aqppliance in the form of an Open Virtualization 

Archive (OVA) file, and hardware appliance, also known as the Cisco Prime Appliance. The virtual appliance is an