Cisco Cisco Prime Network Services Controller 3.0 White Paper
© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Cisco Prime Network Services Controller can provide a unified provisioning platform with a dynamic and scalable
northbound API. Cisco Prime Network Services Controller is built with policy templates. Each device inherits a
certain policy that handles the necessary configurations supported by that device. Using a template of policies
provides an extremely scalable architecture. Please refer to
Network Services Interconnect Options
The evolution of cloud computing and IaaS created several types of network services interconnects, most of them
developed by Cisco and now referred to as overlay networks. Those overlay networks are a type of Layer 2 packet
encapsulation that provides connectivity between endpoints and service appliances and among different service
appliances. The overlay network also provides isolation across different tenants and different local area networks.
The expected growth of such services in cloud environments may require the adoption of specific Layer 2
encapsulation methods to support both multitenancy and scale. The typical and most common solution to provide
NSIs is virtual local area networks (VLANs), and those are based on the 802.1q standard (see Figure 5). This
encapsulation can scale up to ~4000 NSIs on a single physically interconnected Layer 2 domain in the data center.
Several domains (routed/isolated) can allow further scale of the 802.1q NSI. Several technologies (data center
interconnects) developed by Cisco can provide additional scale for multiple Layer 2 physical locations in the data
center. Those do not solve the inherited limit of 802.1q in the same Layer 2 domain.
Figure 5. The 802.1q Local Area Network NSI
Cisco also developed and innovated several Layer 2 tunneling mechanisms or overlay networks to scale the
Layer 2 local domain, scaling Layer 2 NSIs much more, the most recent of them being VXLAN (see Figure 6). This
encapsulation is used between different hypervisors running the Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch. The primary
goal of VXLAN is to extend the VLAN address space by adding a 24-bit segment ID and increasing the number of
available IDs to ~16 million.