Cisco Cisco Prime Network Services Controller 3.0 Livre blanc

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Figure 6. The vxLAN NSI

Being a fairly new technology VXLAN has not been adopted as a standard. As with many other networking

technologies, a formal standard based on VXLAN models and concepts is expected.

Cisco’s VXLAN will be further developed on new platforms and services, providing the needed NSI for data center

cloud use cases. Those NSIs are to be automated by the overlay management systems and create the necessary

connectivity between different cloud services.

The Virtual Data Center Service

With the review provided so far in this paper one can summarize the networking automation requirements for

building a virtual data center (VDC) hosted in the cloud:

●

Dynamically provision network service appliances and their configurations (NSCs)

●

Establish the needed interconnects (NSIs) for end hosts and their network services

●

Manage and monitor all those resources as they are being consumed by users

The three major challenges of network automation, described in this paper, as well as the development of the

underlying NSIs, had so far delayed service providers from offering many of their end-customer requirements.

However, Green-Field service providers have been building their own platforms and products to support those

requirements while developing their own solutions for NSCs and NSIs. Many cloud providers transition to building a

static and highly basic definition of the network services in their cloud catalog, avoiding the need to build a unified

data model of those resources.

Cisco is now changing that paradigm by solving all three challenges with its cloud network automation offering:

●

The Cisco Prime Network Services Controller, for managing top-of-the-line service appliances of all types

and providing a policy-based configuration model with a northbound API that supports its entire feature set

●

Automating NSI configurations across all platforms (using either Cisco Prime Network Services Controller

directly or through a northbound orchestration layer)

●

Using a unified data model for the networking objects

In contrast to the compute resources orderable in the cloud, which offer great flexibility and hit many customer

variances (many different machine resource options, many different operating systems, and so on), cloud network

services capabilities are so far rigid in their nature, preventing the offering of more complex applications and virtual

data center requirements like multiple public and private links and three-tier security models.

Virtual data centers are known as the collection of virtual machines, their compute resources, their applications, but

also their networking resources and networking services discussed so far in this paper (NSCs, NSIs, and the

unified data model that ties them together).