Белая книга для Cisco Cisco Prime Virtual Network Analysis Module (vNAM) 6.1
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White Paper
Network Traffic Visibility and Analysis with Cisco
Nexus Data Broker and Cisco Prime Virtual
Network Analysis Module
Nexus Data Broker and Cisco Prime Virtual
Network Analysis Module
What You Will Learn
Exponential growth in the network traffic has led to increased need for network traffic monitoring. However use of
traditional network traffic monitoring approaches require significant capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating
expenses (OpEx). To address this challenge, many customers are seeking virtual machine-based monitoring tools
for traffic analysis and cost-effective options to deliver network traffic to these tools. This document describes Cisco
Nexus
®
Data Broker, which offers a cost-effective approach to delivering traffic to a variety of monitoring tools
including virtual machine-based monitoring tools. It also describes how Cisco Nexus Data Broker can work with the
virtual machine-based Cisco Prime
™
Virtual Network Analysis Module (vNAM) to provide application traffic visibility
and analysis. In addition, this document presents the details of the configuration required on the hypervisor virtual
switch (vSwitch) to deliver the traffic to Cisco Prime vNAM.
Introduction
Today’s resource-intensive applications are causing network traffic to grow exponentially, putting high demands on
the existing network. Companies are finding it challenging to differentiate critical applications from noncritical ones
and to dynamically allocate network resources to higher-priority applications. To better manage network resources,
you need visibility into the network traffic. To monitor and gain visibility into the network traffic, customers typically
have used purpose-built matrix switches for optical tap and Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) aggregation.
Traditional matrix switches present three main challenges:
●
High cost of the solution, which can be very expensive for large-scale deployments
●
Limitations on deployment and interconnection of these matrix switches to provide a scalable monitoring
network
●
Static way of configuring filters and forwarding traffic, which makes it difficult to take actions based on
events
To address come these challenges, Cisco introduced Cisco Nexus Data Broker, which consists of Cisco Nexus
Family switches acting as tap and SPAN aggregation switches and Cisco Nexus Data Broker software, which
allows the traffic to be filtered and forwarded to various tools sets.