future of cisco prime infrastructure

[Seaver Zhang]

We have upgraded our CiscoWorks LMS 3.2 to Cisco Prime LMS 4.2.3, and we are running another server for Cisco Prime Infrastructure 1.3.

My understanding: Prime LMS 4.2.3 is mainly for wired network and PI for wireless network. We have to run two seperate servers to manage the network. Is my understanding correct.

My question is:  Would Prime Infra still have two parts in future: LMS and NCS? Would Cisco move LMS functionality into NCS in future release? Could NCS be used to manage wired network?

[Leo Laohoo]

Cisco Prime Infrastructure (CPI) can both manage wired and wireless.

[Seaver Zhang]

thanks for reply. I understand that CPI consists Prime LMS and NCS, and prime LMS is used to manage wired network and NCS mainly for wireless. We are having two servers for each of them, and want to learn the possibility of combining two systems into one single server in the future. So I want to learn if Cisco would keep LMS and NCS seperate in future, or if there is any plan to combine them..

[Leo Laohoo]

You'll need to migrate them.  There's no way for Cisco to "combine", I believe.  LMS is gone.  NCS is just temporary until CPI is out. 

[Marvin Rhoads]

The roadmap is for more features to be added to Prime Infrastructure until it does everything the old WCS  and NCS products did for wireless (that part is pretty much done as of PI 1.3) and that the LMS product does for wired (not nearly as far along on that path).

There is a major release (2.0) due out this summer for PI that promises to take a big step towards feature parity with LMS but it will still not be 100%. My experience is that as of right now PI does not have nearly the depth of features (for wired management) - and the documentation on what features it has is very scanty.

While right now PI can manage a good number of wired infrastructure items, there are a good number of things it cannot do. So LMS will be a current and viable product for the forseeable future (1-2 years out in my estimation). It would be premature at this point for most customers to use a single PI installation for all wired and wireless management. That may change with PI 2.0, but we won't know until we see what features make the cut and how well-implemented they are. Already that product ship date has slipped at least 6 months.