ANM 2.1 - Red Hat AS really required?

[lanstreamer]

Hi

The installation guide for ANM 2.1 says that RedHat AS 5 Update 2 (5.2) 32-bit Server Edition (Linux 2.6 Kernel) must be installed if you are installing ANM for the first time on a server where it has never been installed.

Is AS really required as it's not even available for version 5.x (seems to be called Advanced Platform now)? http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/

I'm hoping that this is just a mistake in the install guide as I really can't see that ANM would need unlimited sockets as it's relatively lightweight!

I've had the product working fine in vmware on ordinary Red Hat (Base Server) / Centos 5.2

If anyone from product management is listening here, this whole delivery of ANM only on Red Hat is starting to annoy me, especially as Cisco is starting to deliver some vmware appliance images on top of Centos now!

Thanks for any input.

[hadbou]

Before you use ANM, you should perform the following tasks:

1. Acquire and upload the license file. For details, see Acquiring and Uploading Your ANM License File.

2. (Optional) If your site will not be using the Cisco supplied certificate/key pair for server authentication, you can at any time upload your own certificate/key pair files. For details, see Uploading Site Specific Certificate/Key Pair Files for Server Authentication.

3. Ensure that the ANM hostname exists in the Domain Name Service (DNS) or that the device has the ANM hostname and IP address configured to receive messages in order for device notification to work successfully.

4. Register on Cisco.com. This enables Cisco.com to authenticate you before providing you with a license.

5. Ensure that your email ID and password are correct in your Cisco.com user profile. This information is used to receive email from Cisco.com.

6. Configure your Cisco devices to allow ANM to manage device configuration and collect license data For details, see Preparing to Add Network Elements.

7. Set up network devices and device management by:

-Adding devices to ANM using device import, see Adding Network Devices into ANM.

For more details on ANM installation please follow up on this link:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/net_mgmt/application_networking_manager/2.0/installation/guide/IG_config.html#wp1082686

[Gilles Dufour]

I forwarded your message to the product manager.

He confirmed Redhat is required - some features relies on this particular version.

I hope to get more details on this.

Gilles.

[huangedmc]

We too are very annoyed by the hard requirement of the RHEL version.

Not only do you need to run AS, you need to run 5.2, and nothing else.

We ran a different revision, and had to call TAC for an issue.

First thing they told me was we MUST install the exact version of RHEL listed in the install guide.

Otherwise they won't support it.

[lanstreamer]

I finally got round to raising an official TAC query through our partner on this one and this is the response that came back.

"Cisco have stated that the customer can use it with or without the Advanced Platform.

The customer can use ANM 2.1 without advanced platform.

The difference with 5.x is the amount of sockets and sockets refer

to CPUs/cores, not application sockets. Both should work."

On the back of this comment / clarification we're going to deploy on RedHat 5 Update 2 (5.2) 32-bit Base Server and hope that Cisco take the opportunity to fix the install documentation.

[huangedmc]

Do you mind emailing me their response?

khuang@edmc.edu

thanks.