Cisco Enterprise Service Automation 1.0 Release Notes
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Table of Contents
Cisco Enterprise Service Automation 1.0 Release Notes
Deployment and Diagnostics Status
Role-based Authorization and Control
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
Introduction
Cisco Enterprise Service Automation (ESA) is an orchestration and management tool that allows enterprise IT operation teams to design, provision, and manage virtual and physical branch networks. Through its GUI, ESA provides intuitive ways for designing services for bringing up multiple branch networks in almost no time. ESA operates collaboratively with Cisco Prime Infrastructure (PI) and Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Enterprise Module (APIC-EM) to provision and deploy the configuration and services and to automate monitoring of these services on the enterprise network infrastructure. It helps to ensure optimal performance of virtual network functions (VNFs) running on the Cisco Enterprise Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure Software (NFVIS) by monitoring and managing the health and lifecycle of the services.
ESA workflows align with Information Technology Infrastructure Library processes, providing ways for user-created network designs for initial service provisioning and service upgrades. It also automates the supply of common network attributes for configuring the devices based on the region, location, or type of branches. Being a process tool, ESA versions the configuration changes for audit and troubleshooting purposes before performing the actual provisioning.
System Requirements
For more information on system requirements, see Understanding System Requirements section in Cisco Enterprise Service Automation 1.0 Quick Start Guide.
Installation Guidelines
For detailed information about installing this release of Cisco Enterprise Service Automation, see Installing Enterprise Service Automation section in Cisco Enterprise Service Automation 1.0 Quick Start Guide.
Features and Benefits
This section provides a brief description of the key features and benefits in this release.
Service design
This feature creates uniform network designs with flexibility to provide standardized configurations, thereby reducing the complexity by providing best practices and Cisco validated topology designs for the user-selected branch functions.
Plug and Play
Cisco Enterprise Service Automation provides automated zero-touch deployment and day-zero provisioning for the hardware platforms connecting to the network. That is, ESA along with APIC-EM and PI, automates the deployment of devices on the network by obtaining and applying the configuration on a network device. It reduces the operational cost due to reduced need of technicians on-site to connect and configure the physical hardware and the hosting platforms.
Branch Provisioning
Branch provisioning allows you to provision entire branch (Physical and Virtual) network by automating on-boarding, initial configuration, and customer-supplied configurations. The intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) shows the deployment status of the branch, especially the map view shows the geographical location of the branch and its status.
Device Provisioning
Device provisioning allows you to create new devices and assign those to branch profiles on the network. The devices along with its configurations can be managed automatically from the Prime Infrastructure, thereby reducing the provisioning time.
Profile Management
This features allows you to design the topology for the branch. There are some cisco-verified and pre-defined templates which already contains list of devices associated to the branch. These templates contain its own configuration details that can be used or referred to create custom branch profiles. Through the application’s GUI, you can view the profile status, edit and clone the profile, map to branch and submit for approval.
Virtual Service Chaining
This feature supports Cisco validated topology designs for virtual functions to make sure that the connectivity results in a working branch network, thereby reducing network complexity. It automates service chaining to prevent manual service chaining errors and reduce time required for troubleshooting connectivity issues.
Group Management
This feature automates the multi-branch provisioning by defining common attributes at the group, region, and site levels, It avoids the need to enter the predefined attributes for individual devices or components being provisioned using the tool, thereby improves user experience. The groups are represented in a tree hierarchy where the common attributes are grouped and the devices are classified accordingly.
Deployment and Diagnostics Status
This features provides the branch deployment status by giving insights into errors in provisioning at every logical step per component, thereby improving visibility and reducing the time taken for troubleshooting provisioning errors.
Approval Process
This process is used in the workflow configuration to provide trusted environment for IT organizations before applying any changes to the network. It follows Information Technology Infrastructure Library processes that align with IT organizational needs. This feature allows auto-approval process or authorized users to approve the branch designs and provisioning process.
Important Notes
This section contains important notes about Enterprise Service Automation.
- Prime Infrastructure should have Life Cycle, Assurance and Data Center licenses installed before uploading VNF images to the Virtual Image Repository.
- For the branch provisioning, you must configure the hostname of Prime Infrastructure in the DNS setting. To load the VNF images for the provisioning, NFVIS must be able to resolve the DNS in Prime Infrastructure as NFVIS depends on the network configuration to resolve it.
- ESA provisions branch Day0 configuration through NKP/PI template. After that, VNFs are managed in Prime Infrastructure and network customized configuration can be provisioned through Prime Infrastructure configuration templates.
- You must not add Prime Infrastructure to more than one ESA, as this causes provisioning failure.
Open Caveats
Table 1 lists the Open Caveats in Cisco Enterprise Service Automation GA release.
Click the identifier to view the impact and workaround for the caveat. This information is displayed in the Bug Search Tool. You can track the status of the open caveats using the Bug Search Tool.
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
For information on obtaining documentation, submitting a service request, and gathering additional information, see What’s New in Cisco Product Documentation at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/whatsnew/whatsnew.html.
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Any Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and phone numbers used in this document are not intended to be actual addresses and phone numbers. Any examples, command display output, network topology diagrams, and other figures included in the document are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any use of actual IP addresses or phone numbers in illustrative content is unintentional and coincidental.
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