Table Of Contents

What's New in Campus Manager 5.0

New Features in This Release

What's New in Campus Manager 5.0

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New Features in This Release

The following are the new features and enhancements available in Campus Manager 5.0:

•Dynamic User Tracking

•User Tracking History Reports

•Enhanced User Tracking to Discover End hosts on Trunk Ports

•Enhanced Switch Port Usage Reports

•Enhancements to DNS Resolution

•Enhanced Discrepancy Reports

•New Workflow for VLAN Management Tasks

•Handling Duplicate MAC Address

•Enhanced Topology Services

•Critical Device Poller

•N-Hop View Portlet

•Improved Device Management

•Improved Integration with Other LMS Applications

Dynamic User Tracking

User Tracking Dynamic Updates track changes of the end hosts and users in the network with minimal time delay. In addition to polling the network at regular intervals, Campus Manager tracks the changes in the network whenever they occur.

Dynamic Updates are asynchronous updates that are based on SNMP MAC notification traps.When a host is connected to the network, an SNMP MAC notification trap is immediately sent from the switch to the Campus Manager Server.

These traps enable Campus Manager to provide accurate information about the VLAN, port etc. to which the end host is connected. Traps are generated when a host is connected to the network, disconnected from the network or when it moves between VLANs in the network.

Dynamic updates also report immediately when a user connects to the network, with the help of UTLite scripts. For example, if you have an user named Joe, you can accurately track which switch port he is connected to in real-time.

Thus Dynamic updates provide real-time tracking where there is high user mobility or frequent changes to VLAN information.

User Tracking Major Acquisition tracks a maximum of 250,000 entries (End hosts and IP phones). 2,500,000 end host history records can be maintained in the Campus Manager database.

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Note Campus Manager Data Collection discovers and tracks a maximum of 150,000 Switch Ports.

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For more details, see Understanding Dynamic Updates, page 7-21.

User Tracking History Reports

History Report provides details of the end hosts that were connected to or disconnected from a specific switch port for a period of time.

You can generate history reports based on the IP address and the MAC Address of endhosts, users logged into the endhosts and the devices to which endhosts are connected.

You can generate history reports for Switchport utilization to view the duration for which, the ports in a switch have been used.

You can generate history reports for Switch ports. This report contains details of the host connected to the port, the time at which the host was connected and disconnected, and the VLAN associated to the port.

For more details, see Understanding History Report, page 7-61.

Enhanced User Tracking to Discover End hosts on Trunk Ports

Campus Manager User Tracking is now enhanced to discover end hosts connected to Trunk ports.

From the available non-link trunk ports, select the ports for end host discovery. End hosts connected to the selected non-link trunk ports will get discovered during next UT Major Acquisition cycle.

For more details, see Configuring Trunk for End Host Discovery, page 7-19

Enhanced Switch Port Usage Reports

Switch Port usage reports are enhanced to show the Port Utilization percentage and unused up/down ports for specified period. These reports are:

•Switch Port Utilization report:

Switch Port percentage Utilization report lists the switches that crossed utilization threshold limits along with the value of percentage port utilization. This report enables you to do capacity planning for network growth.

You can schedule these reports as jobs, to get the list of switches that cross the threshold limits at regular intervals

•Reclaim Unused Up Report:

You can generate reports for ports that have been in up state (Administratively Up and Operationally Down) for a specified interval of time.

•Reclaim Unused Down Report:

You can generate reports for ports that have been in down state (Administratively Down and Operationally Down) for a specified interval of time.

•Report on Recently Down ports:

You can generate reports for Recently down ports.

Access ports that were connected to an end host in the last UT Major Acquisition cycle, but were found unconnected in the current Data Collection cycle are listed as Recently Down ports.

•Switch Port Summary Report:

This report gives the number of Connected, Free, and Free down ports in each switch. The ports are classified as follows:

–Ports that are administratively up but are not connected to endhost are Free Ports.

–Ports that are administratively down and are not connected to endhost are Free Down ports.

This report also provides the sum total of Connected, Free and Free down ports in each switch.

For more details, see Understanding Switch Port Usage Reports, page 7-55.

Enhancements to DNS Resolution

Enhancements have been made in DNS resolution by implementing the time-outs and threading for reverse lookups. This results in quick time-outs for the non-existent DNS entries, and reduced time for DNS resolution for all hosts.

If your DNS server supports multiple threads, you can configure User Tracking to use multiple threads, up to a maximum of 12 threads, so that DNS resolution time is faster.

For more details, see Modifying Acquisition Settings, page 7-10

Enhanced Discrepancy Reports

Discrepancies are now classified as Network Discrepancies and Best Practice Deviations.

•Network Discrepancies — Those that have a severe impact on the network connectivity.

•Best Practices Deviations — Best practices that has been recommended by Cisco but not implemented in the network.

Network Discrepancies/Best Practices Deviations reports have been enhanced to enable you to fix the issue with a button click from the UI (currently not available for all types of discrepancies).

The Acknowledge/ Unacknowledged feature provides you the option of viewing only the required Discrepancy/Best Practices Deviation.

•Discrepancies and User Tracking

User Tracking end host reports now show the Discrepancies and Best Practices Deviations associated with each end host port. It also provides a link to launch these reports from User Tracking end host report.

For more details, see Discrepancies and Best Practices Deviations, page 8-1

New Workflow for VLAN Management Tasks

New wizard based User Interface (UI) workflow with enhanced Device selector search facility, that helps you to:

•Create and Delete VLANs

•Create, Delete PVLAN and Configure Promiscuous ports

•Create and Modify Trunk attributes

•Assign ports to VLANs

You can do the following with the improved workflow:

•Create and Delete VLANs on multiple devices irrespective of VTP domain

•Assign access link ports to a desired VLAN

•Move ports to temporary VLAN while deleting the associated VLAN

•Configure Trunks and modify trunk attributes.

Creating trunks through the new UI gives a better user experience than configuring through Topology maps, where the user has to wait for the map to load and then do the configuration.

For more details, see Managing VLANs and VTP, page 10-1.

Handling Duplicate MAC Address

You can specify the list of Switches, Switchports, Subnets and VLANs for which Duplicate MAC addresses can either be included or excluded. For more details, see Configuring Properties That Support Duplicate MAC Address, page 7-12.

Enhanced Topology Services

The following are the enhancements in Topology Services:

•Java Web Start Support

Topology Services and Path Analysis will now be launched in Web Start.

This eliminates conflicts between multiple Java Plug-ins on the client machine and the applications are loaded faster.

•Utilization Statistics in Topology Maps

Topology Services categorizes links in your network according to the percentage of bandwidth utilization. It displays the links using different colors in Topology Maps.

You can customize the percentage of utilization and the color of the links, so that Topology Map displays the links accordingly.

Topology Services computes bandwidth utilization only for Ethernet links and uses Remote Monitoring (RMON) to compute bandwidth utilization.

For more details, see Enabling RMON to Measure Bandwidth Utilization, page 9-34.

•Switch Cluster Support

Campus Manager is now enhanced to discover Commander and member devices of a Switch Cluster. You can create and delete VLANs in these switches.

For more details. see Understanding Cluster Switches, page 9-30.

•PoE Capable Devices

Campus Manager Topology Services now provides a filter to view PoE capable devices in present in your network.

For more details see, Using Topology Filters, page 9-31.

Critical Device Poller

This is a new feature to frequently poll a critical set of devices in your network. The default time at which the critical poller runs is five minutes but allows you to set the timings. Devices can be added to the Critical Device Poller from Topology views and N-Hop view portlet.

For more details, see Device Poller, page 5-25.

N-Hop View Portlet

N-Hop View portlet is a HTML based light weight feature and is available as part of CiscoWorks Portal. This is much faster than the regular Campus Manger Topology services.

When you enter the root device and number of hops, the portlet displays a N-hop view from the specified root device.

The portlet refreshes the topology map every five minutes and the data is fetched from the last polling cycle of the critical device poller. Critical devices can be monitored using this feature, since the changes are reflected immediately in the portlet. This feature should be used to view a limited set of devices.

For more details, see N-Hop View Portlet, page 9-41

Improved Device Management

You can manually add devices from DCR to Campus Manager or delete devices that are being managed in Campus. This Manual mode of adding or deleting devices to and from Campus can work together with the Data Collection filter policies set in Auto mode.

For more details, see Device Management, page 5-18

Improved Integration with Other LMS Applications

You can launch the following LMS applications from CM:

•RME — NetConfig, Software Management

•DFM — Fault History Report, Real-time fault Display (not device specific)

•CiscoWorks Assistant — Device Troubleshooting Report

For more details see, Starting CiscoWorks Applications From Topology Views, page 9-25.

RME CWCLI feature is used by Campus Manager for:

•Trap configurations on switches.

•Fixing discrepancies in the network.

For more details, see Using Administration Reports, page 5-37.