Policy Provisioning Tool Overview

 

 

This chapter provides an overview of the Policy Provisioning Tool (PPT) which is an integral part of the Cisco’s Policy Control and Charging (PCC) Solution, designed to be used in conjunction with the Intelligent Policy Control Function (IPCF) on the ASR5000 and the Subscriber Service Controller (SSC).

This chapter describes the following topics:

•	Introduction

•	System Requirements

•

Licenses

•	PPT Architecture

 

Introduction

Cisco Policy Provisioning Tool (PPT) is a Web-based client-server application which provides the user (network operator) a comprehensive policy design experience. It enables the network operator to design policies and profile modeling at a time with the help of wizard-based use case design and configuration. It interfaces with the IPCF and SSC, there by centralizing the whole operator specific policy management.

PPT is designed to facilitate the network operator by allowing the creation of a local library of rules/rulebases and APNs that exist on the Policy Control Enforcement Function (PCEF), so that they can be used for policy configuration.

PCEF, typically located at the gateway is responsible for enforcing the policy and charging related decisions received from IPCF. PCEF performs service data flow detection as well as gate enforcement for the data flows.

The prominent features of the Cisco PPT include:

•	It facilitates designing highly flexible, easily expandable and manageable use cases.

•	It facilitates building of the provisioning components through libraries containing data related to APN, rules/rulebases, and traffic types.

•	It facilitates configuring the data plans that reside on SSC. In the data plans, the user can configure the usage limits and thresholds

•	It facilitates configuring the notification templates for e-mail and SMS that are sent to the subscribers.

•	It facilitates configuring the Pcc policies, user-defined conditions and actions for the subscribers.

•	It facilitates configuring the QoS profiles. QoS profile is a generic container for QoS parameters to be used at different places.

The PPT application provides a very comprehensive and user-friendly interface to make the above listed configurations and services.

 

System Requirements

This section identifies the minimum system requirements for PPT. Since the PPT software can be installed on Sun Solaris as well as Linux machines, the hardware requirements have been listed for both the platforms separately.

Sun Server Hardware Platform

•	Sun Solaris/SPARC running OS version SunOS 10

•	Sun Microsystems Netra T5220 Server

•	1 x 1.2 GHz 8 core UltraSPARC T2 processors with 16GB RAM

•	2 x 146GB SAS hard disk drives

•	Quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces

Ensure that the following patches are installed:

•	Users based in the United States should ensure that the timezone patch 113225-07 (or later) and libc patch 12874-33 (or later) be installed in support of extended daylight savings time (DST) support.

•	Solaris 10 must be installed using the "End User System support 64-bit" software group and it must be specified during the installation of the operating system. This option installs the libraries required for proper operation of the PPT.

•	Solaris 10 Kernel patch beyond 137137-09 may result in kernel panic while executing/invoking system calls.

•	Solaris 10 with Recommended Patch Cluster dated on or after July 16, 2007 and not later than Nov 2008. Also make sure that the kernel patch is not newer than the stable patch 137137-09

Linux Server Hardware Platform

•	Cisco UCS running OS version ‘Cisco MITG RHEL v5.5’

•	Cisco UCS C210M2 Server

•	2 x Intel Xeon X5675 processors with 32GB DDR3 RAM

•	2 of 300 GB SAS hard disk drives with 10,000 RPM

•	Quad Gigabit Ethernet interfaces

Important: The Cisco MITG RHEL v5.5 OS is a custom image that contains only those software packages required to support compatible Cisco MITG external software applications. Users must not install any other applications on servers running the Cisco MITG RHEL v5.5 OS. For detailed software compatibility information, refer to the “Cisco MITG RHEL v5.5 OS Application Note”.

Client Platform

The only requirement at the client side is a browser which requires the Javascript and cookies enabled. The recommended browsers include Internet Explorer (7 and above) and Mozilla Firefox (3.5 and above).

 

Licenses

There is no specific license required to use/activate the Cisco’s Policy Provisioning Tool.

 

PPT Architecture

The Cisco’s Policy Provisioning Tool comprises of two major components: a GUI client and a server.

PPT Architecture

The server components include:

•	Apache: Apache server is used to relay the requests received from the client(s) to the PPT server.

•

PostgreSQL Database: This is the centralized database for most of the data being accessed by different componets of the policy provisioning tool. It stores the PPT users details who access the PPT application. Other than the user details, it also stores information pertaining to the following elements:

•	IPCF nodes

•

SSC nodes

•	Audit logs

•	Traffic types

•	Rules/rulebases

•

APNs

•	User defined conditions and actions

•

Policies

•	Administrator user

Other important components at the server side include:

•

PSMon: It is a script which runs a daemon process at the PPT server. Its function is to monitor the server components including Apache server, PostgreSQL, and Policy Provisioning Server. PSMon periodically examines the state of PPT components and restarts them if they are not in running state. The administrator can configure the PSMon configuration file for the components to be monitored, time interval (after which their state should be examined), and the maximum number of retries for restarting a component.

Important: The PSMon configuration file is located at <ppt_install_dir>/3rdparty/psmon/psmon.conf.

•

Notification server: It is a script which is responsible for generating SNMP v1 or v2 traps including the instances whenever a PPT component is started/stopped/restarted. It also sends traps for events related to Web server, Database and PSMon. The SNMP targets can be configured using the following script:

<ppt_install_dir>/scripts/configSnmpTarget.sh

The administrator can configure a maximum of 5 SNMP targets at a time. For each target he/she can specify whether it should receive SNMP v1/v2 traps or not.

Important: The notification server checks for the Notification target file after every five minutes, therefore changes made to the SNMP target configuration file would not take more than five minutes to come to effect.

Client components include:

Browser: The only component required at the client side is an Internet browser, which requires the Javascript and cookies enabled.

 

 

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