Cisco Cisco Prime Virtual Network Analysis Module (vNAM) 6.1 White Paper

Cisco's Application Visibility and Control solution is a suite of services for application classification, 
traffic control and monitoring that support capacity planning and resource management, improve 
business-critical application performance, and in the public environment, allow for highly tuned service 
assurance. Technologies such as Quality of Service, previously discussed, Network Based Application 
Recognition, Netflow, Network Analysis and Application Optimization form the basis of this solution 
set.

Cisco Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR) provides the option of using stateful deep 
packet inspection for granular, application-level traffic inspection and traffic classification for 
performance monitoring and tuning or for other use cases, such as application monitoring for security 
purposes. NBAR currently provides the ability to identify over 1000 application signatures. NBAR is 
also capable of defining customized application profiles based on ports, URL or even payload values. 
NBAR is implemented in hardware on physical routers such as the ASR1000 or ISRG2, however on the 
CSR, NBAR is software-based. This means that caution should be employed in deploying NBAR to 
understand the impact on forwarding performance and insure the desired packet throughput.

Cisco developed NetFlow to provide better insight into IP traffic. A key component of Cisco's 
Application, Visibility and Control suite of features and functionality, NetFlow defines flows as records 
and exports the records to collection devices. NetFlow provides information about the applications in 
and utilization of the data center network. The NetFlow collector aggregates and assists network 
administrators and application owners to interpret the performance of the data center environment.

The use of NetFlow is well documented in traditional network environments, but the Nexus 1000V 
provides this capability in the virtual network environment. Nexus 1000V supports NetFlowv9 and by 
default uses the management 0 interface as an export source.

Using advanced features such as NetFlow consumes additional ESXi host resources (memory and

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CPU). It is important to understand these resource dynamics before enabling advanced features.

 shows the Cisco NAM application traffic statistics on the Nexus 1000V virtual Ethernet 

interfaces. The Nexus 1000V can also monitor flows from the physical interfaces associated with the 
platform and VMkernel interfaces including vMotion traffic, as seen in