Cisco CiscoWorks Network Compliance Manager 1.8 Bulletins
Product Bulletin
© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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CiscoWorks Network Compliance Manager 1.5
PB573743
Product Overview
CiscoWorks Network Compliance Manager (NCM) tracks and regulates configuration and software changes
throughout a multivendor network infrastructure. It provides superior visibility into network changes and can track
compliance with a broad variety of regulatory, IT, corporate governance, and technology requirements. NCM helps IT
staff identify and correct trends that could lead to problems such as network instability and service interruption.
New Features
NCM 1.5 includes the following new features:
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Virtual device and virtual context support: NCM now provides support for virtual devices, including
VMware’s Virtual Switch (vSwitch) technology available through VMware’s Infrastructure (ESX) and the Cisco
Nexus 1000v Series switches. These new virtual devices can be managed alongside legacy devices,
providing centralized support. Virtual devices, as well as devices that support virtual contexts, now benefit
from device relationship enhancements that provide management of non-IP addressed contexts, as well as
views of the underlying relationships between the actual hardware and virtual contexts.
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Enhanced relationship modeling: Devices may have relationships with other devices or contained modules
that run an independent operating system—complete with a full configuration and interfaces. NCM 1.5
distinguishes relationship types including both user-defined and system-defined relationships.
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Enhanced task scheduling: Two key task management features, task prioritization and round-robin
execution of group tasks, have been implemented to improve the execution order of tasks.
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Enhanced Device Selector and Device Group Explorer: With the enhanced Device Selector and Device
Group Explorer you can easily navigate group trees to select devices and device groups for a variety of use
cases.
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Enhanced VLAN support: NCM now provides functionalities necessary to view fully and to provision VLANs
on network switches from different vendors.
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Link aggregation support: Using link aggregation support, NCM can list all of the links (or connections)
associated with a specific port on a device. This information is gleaned from enhanced diagnostics or from
new device context information. Link aggregation lets you manage a device with virtual contexts that assign
multiple connections to a physical port.
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Provisioning and scripting API enhancements: You can now list device templates, show device template
configurations, modify device template configurations, and provision devices using the Device Relationships
API.
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Solaris 64-bit support: When installing NCM on a Solaris platform, NCM uses the 64-bit Java Virtual
Machine (JVM). As a result, NCM can utilize more memory and achieve enhanced scalability and
performance.
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Caching improvements: Caching improvements increase performance of many functions across the NCM
product. Minimizing redundant data lookups such as driver lookup and device lookup while using memory
more efficiently on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems have been implemented.