Cisco Cisco Prime Network Services Controller Adaptor for DFA White Paper

 

 

© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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As necessary, this document identifies Cisco DFA features for specific switching platforms as available in the 

current release or in a planned future release. 

Cisco DFA Building Blocks 

Cisco DFA consists of four building blocks (Figure 1): 

● 

Fabric management 

● 

Workload automation 

● 

Optimized networking 

● 

Virtual fabrics 

Figure 1.    Dynamic Fabric Automation Architecture: Innovative Building Blocks 

 

Fabric management is a fundamental building block of the Cisco DFA fabric provided through a collection of 

capabilities combined in the Cisco Prime DataCenter Network Manager or DCNM. These capabilities provide new 

levels of management, simplifying workload visibility, optimizing troubleshooting, and automating fabric component 

provisioning. 

The Cisco DFA simplified Fabric Management is achieved by the following Cisco products and well known network 

services: 

● 

Cisco Prime DCNM 

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Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) 

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Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) 

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Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) 

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Extensive Message Protocol (XMPP) 

● 

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) 

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Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) message broker 

● 

Cisco Prime Network Services Controller (PNSC) Adaptor 

On top of the fabric access layer, the physical switches are initially provisioned using Power-On Auto Provisioning 

(POAP) with fully integrated, easy-to-use templates and workflow. As the fabric is deployed, the cable-plan 

consistency check builds a level of verification to check the network configuration and the related physical cabling. 

Fabric management also provides extensive visibility into the physical network: from the virtual fabric to the 

physical or virtual server.