Cisco Cisco Prime Network Services Controller Adaptor for DFA White Paper
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White Paper
Automate Provisioning of Multitenant Cloud
Environments with Cisco Dynamic Fabric
Automation
Environments with Cisco Dynamic Fabric
Automation
What You Will Learn
Cloud networking implies the automation and orchestration of virtual machine, network, and service provisioning,
as well as management processes that decrease IT touch points to increase efficiency and agility. The Cisco
Dynamic Fabric Automation (Cisco DFA) architecture enables a simplified approach to cloud and network
orchestration, alleviating the traditional complexity commonly required to manage and migrate applications.
The result is a greater virtual machine mobility, smaller failure domains, and greater multi-tenant scale.
Industry Trends
As organizations increasingly move to cloud deployments, data center and service provider networks are being
pressed to adapt to the new application environment and the operational demands it is placing on the underlying
infrastructure. To this end, Cisco has some specific design recommendations:
●
Build around a highly efficient and flexible infrastructure based on open standards
●
Ensure ability to map tenants (users, lines of business, or business apps) and requirements onto secure,
shared, high-performance infrastructure resource pools
●
Deploy centralized policy-driven automation, management and visibility of physical and virtual
environments
●
Establish a common programmable automation and management framework to simplify operations and
increase agility
Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation Architecture
Cisco developed the DFA architecture to create the premier foundation for building cloud infrastructure (Figure 1),
resulting in some distinctive benefits:
●
Greater Efficiency: Optimized spine-leaf topologies with integrated gateways provide greater efficiencies
and seamless mobility for physical and virtual machines and services along with end-to-end visibility. It also
delivers greater resiliency with smaller fault domains and multi-tenant scale.
●
Operational Simplicity: DCNM 7.0 provides centralized fabric management across physical servers and
virtual machines including auto-deployment, integrated fabric access, topology views, monitoring and
health-checks. Open APIs allow better integration with orchestration and automation tools, in addition to
cloud platforms.
●
Greater Agility: Enables network automation and provisioning to speed up application delivery.
The balance of this document will focus on operational simplicity and how Cisco DFA accomplishes this by
automating provisioning of the fabric and its services through a consolidated central point of management and
monitoring (CPOM), provided by Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) Release 7.0.