Ask the Expert: Cisco Prime Infrastructure - Implementation and Deployment

[Lisa Latour]

Welcome to the Cisco Support Community Ask the Expert conversation.

This Ask The expert Session will cover questions spanning Cisco Prime Infrastructure on Implementation and Deployment on Wired and Wireless. This will be more specific to Customer’s and Partners questions product covering PI on configuration, Features and Menu, Network Monitoring, Maps, Implementation, High Availability and Maintenance and t/s parts.

Monday, February 2nd, 2015 to Friday, February 13th, 2015

Dhiresh Yadav is a customer support engineer in High-Touch Technical Services (HTTS)  handling supporting Wireless and Network Management based Cisco products and is based in Bangalore. His areas of expertise include Cisco Prime Infrastructure and Cisco Wireless products. He has over 7 years of industry experience working with large enterprise and service provider networks. He also holds CCNP (RS) and CCIE (DC) certifications.
 
Afroz Ahmad is a customer support engineer in High-Touch Technical Services (HTTS)  handling supporting Wireless and Network Management based Cisco products and is based in Bangalore. His areas of expertise include Cisco NMS products like Prime Infrastructure, LMS, IP SLA and SNMP etc. He has over 7 years of industry experience working with large enterprise and service provider networks. He also holds CCNP (RS),CCIE (DC), and SCJP (Sun Certified Java Professional )
 
Vinod Kumar Arya is a customer support engineer in High-Touch Technical Services (HTTS)  handling supporting Wireless and Network Management based Cisco products and is based in Bangalore. His areas of expertise include Cisco NMS products like Prime Infrastructure, LMS, IP SLA and SNMP etc. He has over 8 years of industry experience working with large enterprise and service provider networks. He also holds VCP 5 and RHCE certifications.
 

** Remember to use the rating system to let the experts know you have received an adequate response.**

Because of the volume expected during this event, the experts might not be able to answer every question. Remember that you can continue the conversation in the Network Infrastructure community, > Network Management, shortly after the event. This event lasts through February 13th 2015. Visit this forum often to view responses to your questions and those of other Cisco Support Community members.

[lo.mueller]

Thanks to all of you experts for this conversation.

Do you know when and in which version all (lacking) LMS-features will be implemented in PI (feature-parity)?

Best Regards

Lothar

[Vinod Arya]

Lothar,

Thanks for your time on this Ask the Expert event.

As we see a constant evolution of PI with every release, many important features are already migrated and some of the features succeed Cisco Prime LMS. But, as some of them are still missing, as per the development plan, the next major release is expected to integrate a lot of pending LMS features into Prime Infrastructure. 

Following is the expected cycle/dev plan for PI :

HTH

-Thanks 

Vinod

**Ratings Encourages Contributors**

[lo.mueller]

Hi Vinod,

thanks for your reply.

Do you know whether the following bug will also be/is planned to be fixed in next Major-Release?

For migrating LMS-Users this is a very important feature as usually config-files will be further processed in other systems.

Bug Id:	CSCud84458
Title:	Need separate folder for config archives to be stored on NCS/PI

Lothar

[Vinod Arya]

Lothar,

Thanks for bringing up such essential questions. This is a very much required feature which many of our customers are looking forward to.

However, I haven't seen any note on which release this bug is going to be fixed and integrated. It is due to the new overhauled architecture of PI, which is causing issues in getting this done.

Apart from all the bad news, I have a good news on this bug, that it, we have a potential work around script which can be used to dump config for your devices directly from DB without using the UI.

I can share the script and the procedure if that is an essential requirement. Please check and let me know.

-Thanks

Vinod

**Ratings Encourages Contributors**

[lo.mueller]

Hi Vinod,

I would really appreciate having the chance to get the script for dumping configs directly from the DB.

What information do you need to transfer it?

- Many thanks

Lothar

[Vinod Arya]

Lothar,

Please find the attached script which you can copy on your server as root to create a simple shell script. This script will help to dump config for your devices directly from DB without using the UI, or a potential workaround for bug CSCud84458.
 
The following can be ran as a shell script as root. Use vi etc. to put it into /opt/CSCOlumos/bin as exportConfig.sh
 
Use chmod +x /opt/CSCOlumos/bin/exportConfig.sh to make it executable
 
By default it exports into /opt/ConfigExport, but this can easily be changed by editing the script
 
It doesn't append configuration into existing files, rather just dump all configuration in the DB out to text files, overwriting any previous export.
 
The script has been tested in the TAC lab and with at least one customer on PI 1.3.1 and 2.0, however should work fine on any PI release.

Snippet of output from successful run from TAC lab:

ade # /opt/CSCOlumos/bin/exportConfig.sh

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.2.0 Production on Thu Nov 7 16:17:20 2013

Copyright (c) 1982, 2010, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options


Function created.


Directory created.

Directory dropped.


Function dropped.

Disconnected from Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options
ade#

Thanks again for your time on this Ask the Expert event.

-Thanks

Vinod

**Ratings Encourages Contributors**

[Marvin Rhoads]

Very nice tool Vinod - thanks.

I just tested it on a PI 2.2 installation and it worked perfectly.

One thing to note is that it will copy all of the archived configurations - could be several versions depending on your PI settings. You will get startup-config, running-config (and, for switches, vlan.dat) backups. My PI managing 158 devices results in 2190 files.

A suggested option might be one that returns only the current running-config.

[Vinod Arya]

Marvin, 

Thanks for your time on this Ask the Expert Event.

This is a very valid ask and hence I will check with the dev team to further optimise and enhance the script for the same. Will share if any feedbacks I will have.

-Thanks

Vinod

[vichoottan]

Hello Guys,

      The literature says that PI 2.2 supports multiple tenants. and we can create profiles for different customers. How are these customers identified by prime ? are they identified by using their domain names ? Can we have multiple customers using same private IP ranges?

[jmandersson]

Hi Experts!

I have a question about the SNMP settings (particular the retries/timeouts) that can be configured on various places on PI:

• When are the settings under Administration/System Settings/SNMP Settings used?
• When are the settings under the Discovery settings used?

During a discovery job I guess the settings under Discovery are used, of course, but how about a Sync? Which settings does the Monitoring Polices use?

Regards,

Johan

[AFROJ AHMAD]

Hi Johan,

Thank you for your time for joining this Event.

1.Administration > System Settings >SNMP Settings

The SNMP Settings page allows you to configure global SNMP settings from Prime Infrastructure.

****This timeout will be used for almost all  the features to fetch the information from the devices via SNMP  like Inventory collection , configuration backup ..SWIM etc..

Note Any changes you make on this page affect Prime Infrastructure globally. The changes are saved across restarts as well as across backups and restores.

2. When are the settings under the Discovery settings used?

This would ONLY be used during the time device discovery will run to discover the devices in your network.

****The device status is Reachable when Prime Infrastructure can reach the device and has verified that the SNMP credentials are correct.

Thanks-

Afroz

***Ratings Encourages Contributors ****

[jmandersson]

Great!

Just two follow-up question:

Based on your answer, I guess that if I have problem with "SNMP Connectivity Failed" under "Last Inventory Collection" in Inventory, it can be related to the Global SNMP Settings, not the Discovery Settings. Is that right?

How about a "Sync"? Is that considered as a new discovery and therefore uses the SNMP settings from Discovery Settings?

Thanks,

Johan

[AFROJ AHMAD]

Hi Johan,

Based on your answer, I guess that if I have problem with "SNMP Connectivity Failed" under "Last Inventory Collection" in Inventory, it can be related to the Global SNMP Settings, not the Discovery Settings. Is that right?

You are correct

How about a "Sync"?  it is not considered as a new discovery , this "Sync" option is to update device whose configuration you want synchronized with the configuration stored in the Prime Infrastructure database. it mean in the background it will be using the global snmp settings.

Thanks-

Afroz

****Ratings Encourages Contributors ****

[lo.mueller]

Hi experts,

two more question regarding PI.

- 1 -

Known from LMS 4.x it is possible to upload an offline-EoX-PSIRT offline file to update End-of-Life database of PI (especially for systems not directly connected with the internet, due to security reasons).

Within PI 2.2 I wasn't able to find a similar procedure.

Are there any plans to enable/implement offline-update EoX/PSIRT information?

- 2 -

It seems that Syslog-Messages sent to PI Syslog-Server are no longer stored first in a raw file and the processed in db, so that it is no longer possible to create a raw dump of it.

Is that a known issue, and are there any workarounds to export in db stored messages to raw file?

Thanks for your feedback.

Lothar