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Cisco® Network Registrar® is an IP address management application that supports scalable network deployment, configuration, service-assurance monitoring, and on-demand service delivery. Its advanced features add intelligence in the network and provide service providers and enterprise customers a flexible foundation for implementing an IP address solution that meets their business needs. Furthermore, Cisco Network Registrar is a carrier-class product proven through deployments by thousands of customers worldwide. The rich interfaces of Cisco Network Registrar help users reduce operational cost through automation of manual procedures. Finally, Cisco Network Registrar can help users reduce operating expenses (OpEx) through consistent automated policies to handle new services and business models.
Product Introduction
Cisco Network Registrar is an IP address management application that delivers IP address management (IPAM) features to ease the task of administering Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services. For enterprise customers, Cisco Network Registrar offers a user-friendly GUI coupled with a built-in, granular administrative role capability to help users focus on running their business rather than dedicating the time to managing their DNS and DHCP services. For cable providers, Cisco Network Registrar provides scalable DNS and DHCP services for hundreds of thousands of devices and forms the basis of a DOCSIS® cable modem provisioning system. For telecom service providers, Cisco Network Registrar continues to play an important factor in service activation for data, voice and video over IP, and mobile services.
Cisco Network Registrar includes a standards-compliant DNS server that offers the most advanced feature set in the industry including support for incremental zone transfers, dynamic updates, and notification. To secure DNS services, Cisco Network Registrar supports transactional signature (TSIG) to authenticate DNS zone transfer and update requests. Cisco Network Registrar DHCP server offers DHCP safe failover with redundant DHCP servers, dynamic DNS updates, and DOCSIS cable modems and integration with directory services using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol version 3 (LDAPv3). Moreover, tight integration with Cisco IOS® devices further elevates the value of this Cisco powered network solution.
The Cisco Network Registrar scalable deployment architecture consists of several local clusters and one regional cluster. The local cluster is deployed in the network to handle DNS and DHCP services. The regional cluster is usually deployed at the data center or the network operations center (NOC) to centrally manage the local clusters.
The regional cluster implements many IPAM features to help users reduce operational cost. With IPAM, Cisco Network Registrar administrators can control and monitor DNS and DHCP servers from a centralized location. This capability eliminates many manual, repetitive, and error-prone tasks in configuring the local servers deployed in the network and allows for a single point of data aggregation and delegation.
Address space management simplifies the task of managing address blocks and can be exercised from the regional cluster. An address block can contain static or dynamic addresses and can have any number of child address blocks culminating in one or more subnets. An administrator can break an address block into small units and push the smaller blocks to a local cluster. Similarly, the administrator can also roll up address blocks in the local cluster under their parent to provide a unified view of the address space. Instead of traversing every single local cluster to gather subnet utilization and lease history information, Cisco Network Registrar administrators can achieve the same result from the regional cluster and thus make the task of collecting usage data simple and virtually effortless. Without an automated solution, the complexity of managing address blocks can be high and the task can be tedious and time consuming.
The regional cluster manages and monitors the local clusters through its cluster management capability. Cluster management allows central management of address spaces and global protocol server configuration, such as policies, client classes, and scope templates. Using the Web UI, the administrator at the regional cluster can add and manage a list of Cisco Network Registrar local clusters and their credentials. With this capability, Cisco Network Registrar administrator can create and manage a list of Cisco Network Registrar local clusters using the Web UI on the regional cluster. To further ease the administration task, the administrator can centrally manage the local clusters, such as creating, pulling, and pushing VPNs, DHCP client classes, scope templates, and policies; managing failover pairs; and handling zone distribution. Through the Web UI, the Cisco Network Registrar administrator can also pull subnet utilization and IP lease history data from the local clusters.
Product Overview
Cisco Network Registrar is a Cisco IP Address management provisioning product that provides highly scalable and reliable DNS, DHCP, and Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) services to help enable efficient and effective provisioning of network devices and services. Its rich and extensible feature sets undisputedly distinguish Cisco Network Registrar from any other DHCP and DNS servers packaged in the market today. Cisco Network Registrar can help reduce operational cost with its central management capability, which simplifies administrative tasks and reduces tedious and error-prone operations associated with network and device configuration.
Cisco Network Registrar implements a complete DNS, DHCP, and TFTP server and provides both a graphically based, scriptable command-line interface (CLI) and a programmable interface through Java administrative functions to help customers configure, automate, and streamline IP networking services. It supports business-critical tasks such as client configuration and provisioning for numerous devices and service models for both service provider and enterprise customers. Its ability to interoperate with Microsoft-based client devices and Active Directory allows customers to use Cisco Network Registrar in a complementary role with the basic Microsoft DHCP and DNS servers.
Cisco Network Registrar automates common tasks such as IP address assignment and management, DHCP and client policy definition and distribution, and day-to-day server maintenance to simplify and streamline IP network configuration and administration. Features such as the LDAP directory interface facilitate integration of DNS and DHCP services with other network management and client-provisioning or service-provisioning applications. Performance-optimized functions provide fast setup and task execution, and an availability-tuned architecture helps to ensure reliable and consistent client services delivery.
Cisco Network Registrar supports consistent implementation of policies, client classes, and scope templates through the cluster management capability. With the concise reporting features, the Cisco Network Registrar administrator can also pull subnet utilization and IP lease history data from the local clusters.
Key Features and Benefits
Cisco Network Registrar is based on a distributed architecture that delivers the highest DNS and DHCP performance in its class. With the latest release, Cisco Network Registrar continues to further heighten its leadership with the following new features.
Resolution Exception Forwarding
Cisco Network Registrar today supports a resolution exception feature that allows users to specify a list of forwarders for a given domain. In some instances, the Cisco Network Registrar DNS server might also contain the name server record of the server for the same domain in the cache. In this scenario, the DNS server will forward the queries to the server as specified in the name server record instead of the forwarders in the exception list. The resolution exception forwarding feature allows users to configure exception resolution for a given domain in conjunction with the existence of the name server record of the server for the same domain in the cache. This feature lets users configure Cisco Network Registrar to select one of the following choices:
• Forward-always: The Cisco Network Registrar DNS server will forward the query only to the servers listed on the exception.
• Forward-first: The Cisco Network Registrar DNS server will first attempt to forward the query to the servers listed in the exception (as noted above). If no response is received, the DNS server will then attempt to query the same servers listed in the cached name server records.
• Forward-last: The Cisco Network Registrar DNS server will first attempt to forward the query to name servers listed in the cached name server records. If no response is received, the server will then attempt to query the servers listed in the exception.
The resolution exception feature provides a flexible configuration of Cisco Network Registrar that supports forwarding queries to both resolution exceptions and to name servers.
DNS Forwarding Performance Enhancement
The Cisco Network Registrar DNS server can be configured as a caching server, which forwards all DNS queries to authoritative servers. This release improves the way Cisco Network Registrar forwards queries to improve its DNS performance. One of the enhancements is to use a hashing algorithm to quickly determine whether there are duplicate requests coming from a client. This detection prevents Cisco Network Registrar from adding unnecessary traffic on the network and still correctly and efficiently resolves DNS queries. This enhancement effectively improves DNS throughput in Cisco Network Registrar and allows for better management of DNS load in the server.
Support for New OS
To further extend its goal to reduce operational cost, Cisco Network Registrar adds support for Solaris 10. With the additional environment, users can now select the operating environment of choice that best meets their business and operation needs.
Licensing Update
Cisco Network Registrar has been and continues to be licensed based on the number of IP nodes. In addition to this licensing policy, separate license keys are needed to activate the regional cluster, router interface configuration management, and IPv6 features. Table 1 lists the system requirements for Cisco Network Registrar.
Table 1. System Requirements
Service and Support
Cisco offers a wide range of services programs to accelerate customer success. These innovative services programs are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners, resulting in high levels of customer satisfaction. Cisco services help you to protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare the network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business. For more information about Cisco Services, see Cisco Technical Support Services or Cisco Advanced Services.
For More Information
For more information about Cisco Network Registrar, visit http://www.cisco.com or contact your local account representative.