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Ask the Expert: Overview of Cisco Prime Service Catalog and Process Orchestrator Solutions

ciscomoderator
Community Manager
Community Manager

Welcome to this Cisco Support Community Ask the Expert conversation. This is an opportunity to learn and ask questions about the Cisco Prime Service Catalog and Process Orchestrator solutions.

Cisco expert Jason Davis will discuss Cisco’s network management products offered under the Cisco Prime framework. If you have questions about Cisco Prime infrastructure or data center automation with our Cisco Prime Service Catalog and Process Orchestrator solutions, join us on the Cisco Support Community.

Jason Davis is a distinguished services engineer in the Intelligent Infrastructure Practice team of Cisco Advanced Services. His role is to provide strategic and tactical consulting for hundreds of Advanced Services customers, lead service innovation, and assess new services and technologies. Jason's primary expertise areas are in network management systems, intelligent automation, virtualization, data center operations, software-defined networking, and network programmability.

Based out of the Research Triangle Park (RTP) campus, Jason is also responsible for administering the Research Triangle Park Network Management Lab, Cisco's largest network management lab.

Since joining Cisco in 1998, Jason has been a frequent speaker at Cisco's Networkers and CiscoLive conferences in the United States and Europe. In the past five years he has also been involved in the conference network setup and monitoring. He is a much sought-after resource by the field sales teams to assist with presales solutions and executive briefings. He has provided strategic and tactical network management consulting for several hundred customers.

Jason is a subject matter expert with the following products and features:

  • Cisco Prime LAN management solution
  • Cisco Prime infrastructure
  • CiscoSecure ACS
  • Cisco Prime Network Registrar
  • Cisco Process Orchestrator
  • Cisco Prime Service Catalog
  • Cisco IP SLA
  • Embedded Event Manager
  • SNMPv3
  • onePK and OpenFlow
  • Cisco UCS
  • Device instrumentation
  • VMware ESX, ESXi, and vCenter
  • ITIL

 

Jason received his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Miami (FL). He has been married for 20 years and has 4 children. His interests include providing audiovisual technical support for churches and conference venues, camping and biking with his family, remote-control helicopter piloting, paintball, and recreational shooting.

 

Remember to use the rating system to let Jason know if you have received an adequate response.

Because of the volume expected during this event, Jason might not be able to answer every question. Remember that you can continue the conversation in Data Center > Intelligent Automation under the subcommunity Cisco Prime Service Catalog shortly after the event. This event lasts through September 12, 2014. Visit this forum often to view responses to your questions and the questions of other Cisco Support Community members.

7 Replies 7

Markus Schwarz
Level 1
Level 1

Dear Jason,

Quite, Impressive introduction here.

 

 

I have my first Cisco Prime 2.0 implementation in a few weeks and the current plan is to host Prime on a client provided VM (tba which vendor)

 

 

I have the following on my shopping list -- already being ordered:)

 

  • R-PI2X-K9 Cisco Prime Infrastructure 2.x
  • L-PI2X-LF-25 Prime Infrastructure 2.x - Lifecycle - 25 Device Lic
  • UCSS-UPIL-1-25 Prime Infra Lifecycle 25 PASS-1yr
  • R-PI20-SW-K9 Prime Infrastructure 2.0 Software
  • L-PI2X-BASE Prime Infrastructure 2.x Base License
  • UCSS-UPIB-1-1 Prime Infra Base PASS-1yr
  • L-PILMS42A-25 Prime Infrastructure LMS 4.2A - 25 Device Base Lic
  • L-PILMS42-KIT Prime Infrastructure - LMS License Kit

 

My 3 question for today if i may:)?

 

Q1: Are you able to recommend any webcast or presentation resources how to get started in setting up and perhaps tuning Prime 2.x from the beginning?

 

Q2: Any min or max server / cpu and memory requirement to watch out for?

 

Q3: I used to work with the Cisco works LMS a few years ago. Does this now mean, that Prime 2.x has the integrated part of the good old cisco works (.config backup, graphical view etc...)?

 

As you can see above, i have the following on my shopping list:

 

  • L-PILMS42A-25 Prime Infrastructure LMS 4.2A - 25 Device Base Lic
  • L-PILMS42-KIT Prime Infrastructure - LMS License Kit

 

 

I appreciate any tips and info.

 

Thank you for the opportunity.


best wishes
Markus

Hi Markus!  Thank you for the compliment and welcome to the Support Community 'Ask the Expert' series.  I'm specifically covering our Intelligent Automation tools (Cisco Prime Service Catalog and Cisco Process Orchestrator) in this series, but I can help you with Cisco Prime LMS and Cisco Prime Infrastructure also.  :)

You mentioned Prime Infra 2.0.  Please note that Prime Infra 2.1.1 is the latest available, so make sure you upgrade once you get installed so you're running the latest and greatest!

Regarding Q1 and setup - Prime Infrastructure has a 'walk-through' configuration guide once you install and get into the web UI.  Some other good resources to note would be the Cisco Prime Infrastructure docs section at:  http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/cloud-systems-management/prime-infrastructure/index.html

I'd also recommend our Demo Series which should help you understand functionality and provide acccess to the product team: http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/cloud-systems-management/prime-infrastructure/cisco_prime_demo.pdf

Regarding Q2 and server sizing - this is covered in the online docs, specifically the QuickStart Guide: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/net_mgmt/prime/infrastructure/2-1/quickstart/guide/cpi_qsg.html#pgfId-46865

Your sizing will depend on how many devices you are managing and what features you enable.  For example, if you get the 'Assurance' licenses you may enable the Performance Monitoring functions of Prime Infrastructure.  You may use it to access Network Analysis Module (NAM) and/or NetFlow data.  The additional polling takes up additional resource.   The Quick Start guide also has some scaling notes right below the server requirements link above.

 

Regarding Q3 and Prime Infra and LMS - we're pretty close to having parity among the products, but one of the reasons when you buy Prime Infra that you also get Prime LMS licenses is because of some features that haven't migrated.  Most notably the 'Campus Manager'/Topology Services function for routers/switches hasn't migrated into Prime Infrastructure yet.  We're getting close!  I've worked with the development team and played with some Alpha code.  So standby - it's coming.  :)

 

Let me know if you have other questions!

 

 

Hello Jason,

Thank you very much for welcoming me to your expert discussion :) I feel to be in the right place, at the right time. Thank you also for answering question beyond your scope here, much appreciated. The information received will help me to go further as such I have submitted a 5 start rating for your first reply.

That sounds promising about the LMS part so yes, I stay tuned and wait patiently.

 

Ok, now let’s revert to the actual topic discussed here. Cisco Prime Service Catalog and Process Orchestrator solutions I have briefly read up on this on CCO (where elseJ) and picked out the following quote

 

 

---- Quote from the Cisco Prime Service Catalog Data Sheet

 

 Today’s end users want self-service and easy access to IT tools and services.

Simultaneously, organizations are seeking ways to extend their cloud management

platforms beyond self-service delivery of virtual machines and infrastructure resources

while increasing their use of cloud-based solutions to enhance business agility and effectiveness.

 

Cisco Prime™ Service Catalog offers tremendous benefits to organizations that want to unify the ways in

which all types of IT services are ordered and fulfilled, not just infrastructure requests

 

---- un quote ---

 

I try to understand what (at high level of course) happens in the back ground when an order is raised and which vendor solution your product can interact with.

As mentioned in the quoted text, this service catalogue goes beyond the standard infrastructure.

 

Let’s say, a user wants to deploy a new email services, or in your example,  extends or create a new web-portal (i.e. for HR to view and manage holiday, staff absence and benefits).

Your solution will need to interact somehow with the 3rd party vendor application that is capable building such portal I believe.

 

Without disclosing to many information, I assume the portal is linked to backend VM,s that spin up requested resources (and more magic of course). Perhaps I am mixing this up with another cisco product where a user can go on the portal and spin up virtual Firewalls, virtual Routers can be provisioned in now time.

 

Out if interest; Is this product also known as Mozart? (project code within Cisco?)

 

I hope query is ok.

Best wishes

Markus

Hi Jason,

management is really not my main area of expertise but I like to be informed and have at least basic idea about various products.

Can you give me just one reason why customer should buy/deploy this product? This obviously can be used even in small networks with less than 25 devices (based on another question here) so I'll appreciate if you can let us know what is the number one reason for customers to go with Cisco Prime Service Catalog.

Is there any paralel/comparison between DCNM and Cisco Prime Service Catalog? I noticed this topic belongs into Data Center group, based on your intro, so I'm trying to figure out where to position it.

Thanks,

Tenaro

Hi Tenaro!  Welcome to the Support Community 'Ask the Expert' series on Intelligent Automation!

No worries about NM not being your area of expertise - we accept ALL types here!  hahaha

 

The question below (related to 25 devices) was about Cisco Prime Infrastructure (and Prime LMS) - those are our primary element management tools for configuration, software image management, alert monitoring, performance monitoring and inventory.

The Cisco Prime Service Catalog tool is different.  PSC is used as a custom service portal tool.  If you have some services you'd like to extend to your customers (or internal staff), then PSC would be the go-to solution.  It allows you to build custom portals which can ask the end-customer the appropriate questions to define a service.  You can do text fields, radio buttons, pull-down menues, etc.  It can interface with a database to do data retrieval rules [eg. List Virtual Machines that are in the environment so a user can select them].

Here's an example - let's assume I'm in Network IT Operations and I want to extend a web interface/portal to my customers that allow them to request a 'service check'.  I could use Prime Service Catalog to build the portal asking 'Which environment?'  [Production, DevTest]  'What Service? [DNS, DHCP, CAM Table Size, Routing Table Size, Temperature, etc]

These user selections in the portal could be sent over to Cisco Process Orchestrator, the automation tool, to gather the appropriate information or make the requested changes.

 

As far as the DCNM part of your question goes.  DCNM is our Data Center operations management solution.  It's job is different from Cisco Prime Service Catalog, which is custom Service Catalog.  It's possible you could use Prime Service Catalog to collect information that could leverage the programmatic interface of DCNM.  Hopefully that makes sense.  If I need to clarify more, please let me know what I should elaborate on.

 

etzmnw001
Level 1
Level 1

Is there a Cisco Certification for Cisco prime.

 

Hi etzmnw001,

There is not really a Cisco certification for Cisco Prime - remember Prime is really a branding of the portfolio of products that make up our network management tools.  Think of it like 'Catalyst' or 'Nexus'.

 

We do have a CCIE on Service Provider Operations that does cover some of the SP-focused network management tools [which fall under the Prime umbrella].

Check it out here: http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/exams/list/ccie_spop.html

 

 

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