Overview to Cisco VIM Insight

Cisco VIM Insight is an optional application, which acts as a single point of management for the Cisco VIM. If inclusive of your Cisco NFVI package, you can use Cisco VIM Insight to manage Cisco NFVI for day-0 and day-n and for multi-site and multi-pod management features.

Cisco VIM Insight Overview

Cisco VIM 2.2 provides an Intuitive and easy way to deploy and manage the NFVI platform, reducing user-error and providing visualization deployment which is a mechanism to manage multiple Cisco VIM Pods from a single portal. In CiscoVIM 2.2, a light-weight UI which is a dockerized application, that supports multi-tenancy with local RBAC support and CiscoVIM Rest layer are integrated. The container based UI platform manages multiple CiscoVIM pods right from day-0, or above in the lifecycle of the cloud.

The architecture of the CiscoVIM Insight's interaction with a Pod is depicted below:
Figure 1. Cisco VIM Insight's Interaction with a Pod

The architecture of the CiscoVIM Insight is light-weight, hierarchical, and scalable. Each local site is autonomous with localized toolsets. Global Unified Management UI, provides ease of management with multi-site multi-pod capability for distributed NFV deployment at scale. This facility can be used through browsers such as IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. CiscoVIM Insight by itself, is designed to operate in HA as an option. The platform is a modular, loosely coupled architecture, that provides the capability to manage multiple pods, with RBAC support as depicted in the following figure:
Figure 2. Cisco VIM Insight Architecture

The Cisco VIM insight can be installed in Standalone/non-HA mode: One can start off by installing in a Standalone/non-HA mode (on the management node of the pod) or a standalone (BOM same as the management node) server.

As the UI interacts with each Pod through REST API and very little RBAC information of the Admin and user is kept in the DB, rendering the migrating from one install mode to another can be done effectively.

The UI has two types of views: As part of bootstrap UI Admin info is needed, you can add more users as UI and/or Pod Admin.

  • UI Admin: UI Admin can add users as UI and/or Pod Admin.

  • Pod Admin: Pod Admin have the privilege only at the Pod level, unless he is also an UI Admin.

Cisco VIM Insight Admin UI Overview

To ensure the right level of security and delegation, the Admin UI is responsible for management of UI and/or Pod admin, which includes adding and revoking user privileges. Also, the UI Admin can delete an existing Pod from the overall management pane.

Cisco VIM Insight Pod UI Overview

The Pod UI, is responsible for managing each Pod. VIM Insight gives easy access to switch between multiple Pods, that is being managed by a given Pod Admin. Through the Pod UI, a Pod Admin can manage users and their respective roles and responsibilities. Also, the Pod UI provides the user to execute day-0 (install) and day-n (Pod management, software update, and so on.) activities seamlessly. ELK, Horizon Web UI, and so on are also cross-launched and visible for each Pod through the Pod UI.