A. Cisco Multicast Manager is a Web-based network management application that simplifies the monitoring and troubleshooting of multicast networks.
Q. Who should deploy Cisco Multicast Manager?
A. Cisco Multicast Manager is applicable to enterprise customers that employ multicast for financial market data, to multiple system operators (MSOs) that utilize multicast to transport video over IP, and to service providers that need to manage their Multicast VPN (MVPN) environment.
Q. What benefits can customers expect from deploying Cisco Multicast Manager Release 2.5?
A. Cisco Multicast Manager Release 2.5 provides the following customer benefits:
• Selective Source monitoring: Allows customers to define specific Source devices to be monitored for ongoing health and availability metrics of mission-critical multicast components
• Targeted multicast discovery by subnet: Limits the scope of the multicast discovery and monitoring for simplification and efficiency
• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) trap receiver support: Accepts traps for processing and display of alerts and events
• Enhanced MVPN support: Functionally bridges the discovery and multicast trace ability spanning across the customer edge to the provider edge to present a holistic view of the entire multicast environment without user interaction with any of the devices from the provider network
• Video operations solution (VOS) integration withIneoQuest Technologies (IQ) iVMS provides efficient, real-time video fault information to Cisco Multicast Manager and allows the user to launch the iVMS application to isolate multicast video problems
• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)1 support: Adds secure Web application login support
Q. What major features are provided in Cisco Multicast Manager?
A. Table 1 lists the major features of Cisco Multicast Manager.
Table 1. Features of Cisco Multicast Manager
Feature
Benefit
Automated multicast discovery
Discovers complete multicast topology from a single seed device, along with the MVPN provider and provider edge devices and Virtual Route Forwarding (VRF) tables they support
Proactive polling engine
Highly scalable polling engine to detect multicast anomalies before they become critical problems
Alerts and reports
Any exceptions detected by the polling engine are sent as SNMP traps and logged for reporting purposes. Reports are available for Rendezvous Points (RPs), Source-Group (S,G) packet per second (pps) rates, tree changes, interface bandwidth, Layer 2 port pps rates
Show all groups
Provides a complete list of the complete, active S,Gs
IGMP diagnostics
Displays all devices that have seen an Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) join for a particular group
MSDP status
Shows the status of all Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP)-enabled devices and their peers, including Source-Active cache information
Layer 2 diagnostics
Shows which multicast groups are being forwarded on a particular Layer 2 switch port
Health check
Provides on-demand checking of forwarding trees, RPs and checking for the existence of specific S,Gs can also be scheduled to run automatically
6500/7600 troubleshooting
Provides the equivalent of a Cisco IOS® Software command-line interface "show tech" for multicast, along with Local Target Logic (LTL) checking and pps rates taken from the route processor, switch processor, or distributed forwarding card. Output can be e-mailed directly to the Cisco Technical Assistance Center for further analysis.
Q. What equipment does Cisco Multicast Manager manage?
A. All multicast-enabled devices running Cisco IOS Software, including Layer 2 switches, as well as the Cisco CRS platform running Cisco IOS XR up to Software Release 3.6, can be monitored by Cisco Multicast Manager.
Product Licensing and Platform Requirements
Q. How is Cisco Multicast Manager software licensed?
A. The software is licensed on a per server basis. The customer must purchase a basic software license (either a Solaris version license or a Linux license) that covers the right to use Cisco Multicast Manager for either a small deployment (fewer than 200 devices), medium-size deployment (fewer than 500), or large-scale deployment (unlimited devices). Please refer to the Cisco Multicast Manager ordering guide for part numbers and pricing.
Q. What hardware platform is required to run Cisco Multicast Manager?
A. Table 2 lists the hardware platform required for Cisco Multicast Manager.
Table 2. Table 2. Hardware Requirements for Cisco Multicast Manager
Component
Description
Disk space
2 GB or more free space for Cisco Multicast Manager application and data
Hardware
Linux
• Dual AMD Opteron Processor 250 2.4-GHz 64-bit for large enterprise (more than 500 devices)
• Dual 2.8-GHz Intel Pentium IV or dual 2.8-GHz Intel Xeon processor for large enterprise (more than 500 devices)
• 2.8-GHz Intel Pentium IV or 2.8-GHz Intel Xeon processor
Solaris
• Sun Fire v440: Up to four 1.593-GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processors for large enterprise (more than 500 devices)
• Sun Fire v240: One 1.34-GHz or two 1.5-GHz UltraSPARC processors
Memory
• 2 GB
• 4 GB for large enterprise (more than 500 devices)
Software
Linux
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES/AS 3
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES/AS 4
Solaris
• Solaris 8
• Solaris 9
• Solaris 10
Note: Solaris x86 is not supported
Browser
• Firefox 1.5 or greater
• Internet Explorer 6
• Netscape 7.0
• Mozilla 1.7
• Safari 2.0
Q. How do customers migrate from Cisco Multicast Manager Release 2.4 to Release 2.5?
A. Customers that have purchased Cisco Multicast Manager Release 2.4 can migrate to Cisco Multicast Manager Release 2.5 by purchasing part number CMM-2.4-2.5-UG-K9.
1This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. For more details please visit the following website: http://www.openssl.org/
