Centralized Cisco Works 3.2 LMS Deployment over WAN

[Mayank Nauni]

Greetings,

I need your suggestions regarding the deployment of Cisco Works 3.2 LMS over the WAN. We will be keeping Cisco Works server at a centralized location and shall be managing the devices located in rest of the countries via centralized Cisco Works server. However we will be using a few modules of Cisco works owing to bandwidth concerns. The functionality we’ll be using are:

1.       Automated device backup

2.       Inventory management

3.       IOS management

4.       Network discovery

5.       Cisco View ( as and when required)

My concern is, is there any data readily available with Cisco defining the bandwidth used by these modules ( I understand that this is an awkward question as a LMS is supposed to be deployed in LAN environment) as we don’t want this deployment to cause bandwidth congestion. What all low bandwidth consuming features can be used by us (We already have a HP NNM for monitoring presently)? In case of absence of such bandwidth calculation methodology with Cisco we are planning to perform a pilot testing. I would appreciate if anyone can convey us the considerations while a pilot testing is performed.

Regards,

Mayank Nauni

[Joe Clarke]

It would be very difficult to answer such a question because there are too many variables (e.g. how often will you be running inventory and config fetch jobs, how big are your config files, how often will you be running Data Collection, etc.).  Your idea of conducting a pilot test for your environment is a good one.  You can then measure the actual bandwidth required for your desired settings.

[Mayank Nauni]

Thanks for the response Mr. Clarke ... these modules will be scheduled for monthly utlization ( monthly backup and data collection), also please suggest what all parameters we need to keep in mind while performing a pilot deployment.

Regards,

Mayank Nauni

[Joe Clarke]

Monthly config backup assumes a very stable network.  In that case, you will probably not be seeing a lot of bandwidth utilization as you could scale back on things like Campus Data Collection as well.  Your big hitters will be DFM polling (the default is to poll every four minutes), and User Tracking acquisition which needs to run when users are logged into the network.  I assume this WAN contains multiple LANs, so you will probably be wanting UT.  The other parameter is RME inventory polling and collection which is always enabled.  For a stable network, you could probably turn these up as well.  Perhaps you could run polling every week, and collection once a month as well.

[Mayank Nauni]

Thanks for your help Mr. Clarke....  I am about to start the pilot and shall share the outputs with you.

Regards,

Mayank Nauni