With the abundance of data that flows through a network these days, automation is inevitable and is the only way to achieve scale and time-efficiency. NSO Service Packs initiative was started based on this approach almost about 18 months back. The idea is to rapidly enhance an organization’s automation capabilities and provide them an edge over their competitors within a short-window of time. Based on majority of customer requirements & market research, we picked the most popular & sought after automation use cases, primarily the ones on which network engineers spent their costly time on a frequent basis. We used NSO’s best practices and validated design to develop these Automation service packs, that will help save an engineer’s time to help them focus on other key activities and also provide a jump-start for automation with ready-to-deploy out of the box use-cases. This way automation doesn’t always have to start from ground-0. These service packs provide a pre-built platform from where you can start your automation.
Automation Service Pack Objectives
- Ready-to-deploy automation use-cases
- Improved Efficiency & Scaling
- Minimal time to deploy
- Reduced likelihood of human error
- Generic, re-usable & extensible to fit any customer’s network environment
- Automation based on industry-wide best practices.
- Lower Operating costs
- Minimal network downtime
Below is the list of Re-usable Automation Service Packs that have been developed based on Customer interest & market-demands:
- OS-Upgrade
- ZTP - Zero Touch Provisioning
- Device Migration
- Port Turnup
- Network Compliance
- Compass (L2 / L3 VPN)
- Brown-field Service Discovery
- & more ...
Below are highlights of service packs which we will demo at NSO developer days:
OS-Upgrade Service Pack
Software Upgrades are part of any networking platform. With the evolution of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), infrastructure providers are constantly adding new features, enhancements, and bug-fixes that are bundled with each new release of the Operating System. Therefore, to make use of the cutting-edge features, Service-providers (SP) and Enterprises have to constantly upgrade their Networking platform and keep up with the pace by upgrading their network infrastructure.
With this in mind, Cisco CX has developed this NSO based OS-Upgrade Service pack to provide a generic and re-usable software upgrade platform that can be used by customers to perform automated Software upgrades on their network infrastructure.
This platform is not tied to a specific platform or a vendor, in other words “Platform-agnostic” and “Vendor-agnostic.” The user has the freedom to define / configure software-upgrade workflows for any platform that needs an upgrade.
This framework follows a “define once, re-use multiple times” approach & has been tested with a wide variety of device-platforms (both Cisco and 3rd party platforms).
Features
- Generic Software-upgrade platform to support user-configurable upgrade workflows for various device-types.
- Single-path and multi-path upgrades.
- Sequential and Parallel upgrade of multiple devices / device-groups.
- Perform health-checks on the device prior to upgrade.
- Live upgrade-status monitoring.
- Image-Staging - get devices ready for upgrade by copying image(s) of target version.
- Pre-post checks which can be executed before & after the upgrade to identify any difference in device configs.
- Critical BUG Check to pre-emptively prevent the upgrade if there are critical bugs associated with software images.
- Lazy upgrades - Perform an upgrade only when it is required.
- Dynamic upgrade path calculation based on source-target versions.
- Dynamic regional image-server selection with multi-protocol support (SCP/ SFTP/ FTP/ TFTP).
- Email notification - To notify stake-holders on upgrade statuses.
- Audit logging - Help operation team debug any issues
- Automated Firmware upgrades - Dynamic detection to check perform firmware-upgrades if needed (EPLD / FEX / BIOS / ROMMON upgrades)
- Smart upgrades with minimal user-inputs.
- Dynamic Transfer protocol and VRF identification.
- Flexibility to add user-defined variables as part of the upgrade workflow.
- User-friendly Upgrade diff-reports with color-coded side-by-side comparison of configs before & after the upgrade.
Supported Platforms
- Cisco-IOS
- Cisco-NXOS
- Cisco-IOS-XR
- Cisco-StarOS
- Cisco IOS-XE
- Cisco ASA
- Juniper JunOS
Zero Touch Provision Service Pack
In today’s world, networks are modernizing and expanding at a faster pace. There is a need to onboard modern devices to networks at a rapid pace to meet challenging security requirements and technological advancements. Cisco CX has developed this package which will make it easier for organizations to onboard new devices using zero touch provisioning process.
Supported ZTP Flavors
- POAP scripts supported by modern devices
- DHCP based
- SNMP based
- Northbound Controlled Provisioning
- Java and Python support
Features
- Role based configuration
- Custom configuration support
- Multi device provisioning
- Provisioning history logs
Supported Platforms
- Cisco-IOS
- Cisco-NXOS
- Cisco-IOS-XR
- Arista DCS
For NSO Developer Days 2019 registration and information please visit https://cisco.com/go/nso2019
