Introduction

Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC) is a Virtual Network Functions Manager (VNFM), which performs lifecycle management of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs).

The Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC) promotes agility, flexibility, and programmability in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environments - and offers comprehensive automated lifecycle management capabilities. By design, Cisco ESC is built as an open and a modular system. It provides a single point of control to manage all aspects of VNF lifecycle for generic virtual network functions (VNFs) in a dynamic environment. Drawing on industry standards and open APIs, you can control the full lifecycle of all of your virtualized resources, whether using Cisco or third-party VNFs, allowing you to choose best-of-breed industry solutions.

  • As part of the Cisco Orchestration Suite, ESC is packaged with Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) and Cisco NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) bundle. This is available within Cisco Solutions such as Virtual Managed Services (vMS).

  • As a standalone product, ESC is available as a Virtual Network Function Manager bundled with several Cisco VNFs such as VPN, vRouter and many others.

Supported Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIM)

ESC supports lifecycle management of VNFs on OpenStack, VMware vCenter, vCloud Director and Amazon Web Services (AWS). For more details, see the Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.

New Features and Enhancements of 4.2

This section describes the features added in Cisco Elastic Services Controller Release 4.2.

  • KPI Monitoring and Day 0 Substitution Dual Stack Support—Dual stack now supports KPI monitoring and dual stack interfaces can now be used in day 0 variable substitution. For more information, see the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.

  • ESC Portal—ESC portal supports configuring VIM connectors and multi VIM deployment. For more information, see the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.

  • VMware vCloud Director Support—ESC supports deploying VNFs on VMware vCloud Director. For more information, see Deploying VNFs on VMware vCloud Director in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.

  • Updating the Image in an Existing Deployment—You can update the image references in a VM group in an existing deployment. For more information, see Updating an Image in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.

  • ETSI Updates

    • ESC allows you to modify the properties of a single VNF instance. For more information, see the VNF Lifecycle Operations Using ETSI API, in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.

    • ESC can scale VMs using the ETSI API. For more information, see Scaling VNFs Using ETSI API in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.

    • ESC can heal VMs using the ETSI API. For more information, see Healing VNFs Using ETSI API in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.

    • ESC provides alarms and notifications to the NFVO. The NFVO must subscribe to these notifications. For more information, see Alarms and Notifications for ETSI LCM Operations in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.

  • ESC High Availability on VMware vCenter or vSphere—You can deploy ESC HA on VMware vCenter or vSphere with user data as a High Availabitity pair and not as standalone instances.

  • OpenStack Version Support—Cisco Elastic Services Controller 4.2 supports Queens version of OpenStack.

For more information, see the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide and Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.

Cisco Elastic Services Controller Bugs

For a complete list of open and resolved bugs for this release, use the Cisco Bug Search tool.

Open Bugs

The table below lists the open issues in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller 4.2 release.

Table 1. Open Bugs in Cisco Elastic Services Controller 4.2

Bug ID

Description

CSCvg11968

Restarting after post deploy script failure brings the deployment back to active state

CSCvg78357

After recovery fails and no hosts available, manual recovery fails

CSCvk02152

esc_nc_cli authentication failed after ESC upgrade

Cisco Bug Search Tool

Bug Search Tool (BST), the online successor to Bug Toolkit, is designed to improve our customers' effectiveness in network risk management and device troubleshooting.

BST allows partners and customers to search for software bugs based on product, release, and keyword, and aggregates key data such as bug details, product, and version. The service has provision to filter bugs based on credentials to provide external and internal bug views for the search input.

To use the BST to search for a specific bug or to search for all bugs in a release:

Procedure

Step 1

Go to http://tools.cisco.com/bugsearch.

Step 2

At the Log In screen, enter your registered Cisco.com username and password; then, click Log In. The Bug Search page opens.

Note 

If you do not have a Cisco.com username and password, you can register for them at http://tools.cisco.com/RPF/register/register.do.

Step 3

To search for a specific bug, enter the bug ID in the Search For field and press Return.

Step 4

To search for bugs in the current release:

  1. In the Search For field, enter a keyword and press Return. (Leave the other fields empty).

  2. When the search results are displayed, use the filter tools to find the types of bugs you are looking for. You can search for bugs by modified date, status, severity, and so forth.
    Tip 

    To export the results to a spreadsheet, click the Export All to Spreadsheet link.

See Bug Search Tools & Resources on Cisco.com. For more details on the tool overview and functionalities, check out the help page, located at http://www.cisco.com/web/applicat/cbsshelp/help.html

Accessibility Features in Cisco ESC

For a list of accessibility features in Cisco ESC 4.2, see Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) on the Cisco website, or contact accessibility@cisco.com.

All product documents are accessible except for images, graphics, and some charts. If you would like to receive the product documentation in audio format, braille, or large print, contact accessibility@cisco.com.

Related Documentation

The following documents are available for Cisco Elastic Services Controller:

  • Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide

  • Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide

  • Cisco Elastic Services Controller NETCONF API Guide

  • Cisco Elastic Services Controller REST API Guide

  • Cisco Elastic Services Controller ETSI API Guide

  • Cisco Elastic Services Controller Deployment Attributes

You can access the documents at:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/cloud-systems-management/elastic-services-controller-esc/tsd-products-support-series-home.html.