Cisco Nexus Dashboard is the next generation of the Application Services Engine and provides a common platform for deploying Cisco Data Center applications. These applications provide real time analytics, visibility, and assurance for policy and infrastructure.

This document describes the features, issues, and limitations for the Cisco Nexus Dashboard software.

For more information, see the “Related Content” section of this document.

Note: The documentation set for this product strives to use bias-free language. For the purposes of this documentation set, bias-free is defined as language that does not imply discrimination based on age, disability, gender, racial identity, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality. Exceptions may be present in the documentation due to language that is hardcoded in the user interfaces of the product software, language used based on RFP documentation, or language that is used by a referenced third-party product.

Date

Description

March 31, 2025

·       Additional open issue CSCwo61222.

·       Updated the “Compatibility” section and added Table 1 Supported UCS server firmware.

April 04, 2024

Additional known issue CSCwj44955.

September 19, 2023

Added support for CIMC 4.3(2.230207).

September 12, 2023

Additional open issue CSCwh23260.

March 30, 2023

Updated the “Compatibility” section to remove restriction on UCS-225-M6 compatibility with NDFC.

The NDFC service is now supported on the UCS-225-M6 hardware.

March 23, 2023

Updated the “Verified Scalability Limits” section with an additional 9-node virtual (ESX) cluster profile. This profile has been supported since release 2.2(1e).

March 22, 2023

Additional known issue CSCwb31373.

March 13, 2023

Added support for CIMC version 4.2(3b).

March 1, 2023

Updated the minimum required CIMC version to 4.2(2g) in the “Compatibility” section.

February 2, 2023

Additional open issue CSCwe20433.

January 31, 2023

Release 2.3(1c) became available.

New Software Features

This release adds the following new features:

Product Impact

Feature

Description

Base Functionality

Support for UCS 225 M6 Servers for Physical Nodes

You can now order Nexus Dashboard physical nodes on UCS-225-M6 server hardware. The existing UCS-220-M5 hardware continues to be supported by this release.

For more information, see the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Hardware Setup Guide for UCS-C225-M6 Servers.

NOTE: Cisco UCS-225-M6 hardware platform does not support Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller service at this time.

Security

Remote Site Certificate Validation

You can now import a site controller's Certificate Authority (CA) root certificate chain into Nexus Dashboard. This allows you to verify that the certificates of hosts to which your Nexus Dashboard connects (such as site controllers) are valid and are signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) when you add the sites.

For more information, see the “Administrative” chapter of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard User Guide.

Ease of use

New Look and Feel

The Nexus Dashboard UI has been refreshed.

NOTE: Some of the existing configuration procedures in the documentation may still use the older UI screenshots and diagrams. While the look and feel of the new UI is different, the arrangement of the screens and configuration options remains the same.

Changes in Behavior

If you are installing or upgrading to this release, you must consider the following:

●      Before upgrading your existing Nexus Dashboard cluster to this release, you must disable all services running in the cluster.

If you have Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller service, you must keep it disabled until the cluster is upgraded to release 2.3(1) and the NDFC service is upgraded to release 12.1(2).

●      If you have Nexus Dashboard Insights service, you cannot upgrade to this release.

For example, if you have Nexus Dashboard Insights and Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller hosted in the same Nexus Dashboard cluster, cluster upgrade will be blocked by the system.

●      If you have both Nexus Dashboard Insights and Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller in your environment but hosted in different Nexus Dashboard clusters, we recommend that you wait until the release of Nexus Dashboard Insights version 6.2.1 with the next Nexus Dashboard release 2.3(1) patch and then upgrade both clusters together.

●      Beginning with release 2.2.1, service deployment profiles have been replaced with Network Scale settings.

Resource profile selection has been reduced to a number of more intuitive parameters directly related to your deployment use case. These parameters, such as number of switches or flows, describe the fabric size and use case intent and allow the cluster to intelligently determine the resources needed for the service. The parameters are categorized as "Network Scale" and must be provided prior to service deployment, as described in the Cisco Nexus Dashboard User Guide.

●      The primary cluster, which you use to establish multi-cluster connectivity, must be running the same or later release of Nexus Dashboard as all other clusters in the group.

In other words, you cannot connect a Nexus Dashboard cluster running release 2.3(1) from a primary cluster that is running release 2.2(1).

If you are upgrading multiple clusters that are connected together, you must upgrade the primary cluster first.

●      After upgrading to this release, we recommend upgrading all the services to their latest versions.

●      Nexus Dashboard platform downgrades are not supported.

Open Issues

This section lists the open issues. Click the bug ID to access the Bug Search Tool and see additional information about the issue. The "Exists In" column of the table specifies the releases in which the issue exists.

Bug ID

Description

Exists in

CSCwo61222

Nexus Dashboard Physical Appliance is unable to boot after updating the IMC firmware to version 4.3(5.x).

2.3(1c) and later

CSCvx93124

You see a message like:

[2021-04-13 13:48:20,170] ERROR Error while appending records to stats-6 in dir /data/services/kafka/data/0 (kafka.server.LogDirFailureChannel)

java.io.IOException: No space left on device

2.3(1c) and later

CSCwd48788

Error during local tar file upload for RHEL platform

2.3(1c) and later

CSCwe19041

TLS 1.3 ciphers is not configurable. TLS1.3 ND offers all the three ciphers TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256, TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256

2.3(1c) and later

CSCwe21853

NDFC service fails to come up after a reboot or power cycle of at least two master nodes of the cluster.

2.3(1c) and later

CSCwe20667

Upgrade done via Firmware Management of Nexus Dashboard fails.

2.3(1c) and later

CSCwh23260

The pods in event manager namespace are crashing or are not in ready state

2.3(1c) and later

Resolved Issues

This section lists the resolved issues. Click the bug ID to access the Bug Search tool and see additional information about the issue. The "Fixed In" column of the table specifies whether the bug was resolved in the base release or a patch release.

Bug ID

Description

Fixed in

CSCwc68051

Using the "Run" feature of the API documentation from a running ND host can result in incorrect requests to internal APIs that are due to the autogenerated documentation and do not indicate problems with the API.

And you may see the following error: “Could not find an item type for this item”.

2.3(1c)

CSCwc68090

Using the "Run" feature of the API documentation from a running ND host can result in incorrect requests to internal APIs that are due to the autogenerated documentation and do not indicate problems with the API.

The UI sending request by adding %3A in the URL so the requests are failing.

2.3(1c)

CSCwc76548

The UI may show an alert stating "Unable to reach NTP server(s). Validation failed for $ip" if an FQDN is used for configuring an NTP server when IPv6 is not configured.

This is an incorrect message, the NTP server is likely reachable and the system health status as shown in the system overview or on the command line via `acs health` are correct.

2.3(1c)

CSCwb31364

The UI login screen may show older ND version, even though ND upgrade is completed successfully.

The "Firmware Management" page will report that all nodes have completed upgrade successfully.

2.3(1c)

CSCwc68061

Using the "Run" feature of the API documentation from a running ND host can result in incorrect requests to internal APIs that are due to the autogenerated documentation and do not indicate problems with the API.

And you may see the following error: “Response maximum payload length of 10000 exceeded: (561001 characters)”.

2.3(1c)

CSCwb28144

External Services IPs used by NDFC for following cases may not work

1. Syslog Trap IP

2. POAP IP for tftp/http/scp from switch.

3. End point locator IPs for NDFC GO-BGP connectivity

4. IPFM Telemetry IPs for Streaming telemetry

5. SAN Insights Telemetry Receiver IPs for SAN Analytics telemetry

2.3(1c)

CSCwe20433

In the Cluster Configuration page of Nexus Dashboard, there may be variations in Network Scale option limits based on the profile when attempting to set them.

2.3(1c)

Known Issues

This section lists known behaviors. Click the Bug ID to access the Bug Search Tool and see additional information about the issue.

Bug ID

Description

CSCvy62110

For Nexus Dashboard nodes connected to Catalyst switches packets are tagged with vlan0 even though no VLAN is specified. This causes no reachability over the data network. In this case, 'switchport voice vlan dot1p' command must be added to the switch interfaces where the nodes are connected.

CSCvw39822

On power cycle system lvm initialization may fail on due to a slowness in the disks.

CSCvw48448

Upgrade fails and cluster is in diverged state with one or more nodes on the target version.

CSCvw57953

When the system is being recovered with a clean reboot of all nodes, the admin login password will be reset to the day0 password that is entered during the bootstrap of the cluster.

CSCvw70476

When bringing up ND cluster first time, all three master nodes need to join Kafka cluster before any master node can be rebooted. Failing to do so, 2 node cluster doesn't become healthy as Kafka cluster requires 3 nodes to be in Kafka cluster first time.

CSCvx89368

After ND upgrade, there will be still pods belonging to the older version running on the cluster.

CSCvx98282

Pods in pending state for a long period upon restart. These pods are usually stateful sets that require specific node placement and capacity must be available on the specific node they are first scheduled. This happens when multiple applications are installed on the same ND cluster and the ND capacity overloaded.

CSCvu21304

Intersight device connector connects to the Intersight over the Cisco Application Services Engine Out-Of-Band Management.

CSCwe04619

The 'acs health' command may show a service as unhealthy and kubectl (available in the Tech Support collection) shows the service is in ContainerCreateError state.

CSCwd84875

Two Nodes RMA requires manual intervention.

CSCwb31373

After node failover, kubernetes scheduling may be unable to find appropriate resources for the pods in an app.

The symptom is that the app health will not converge and kubectl commands will show unhealthy pods.

CSCwj44955

There may be an issue during the bootstrap process on 3-node vND (ESX) clusters which can cause the 'acs health' command to show the following error:

'k8s: services not in desired state - aaamgr,cisco-intersightdc,eventmonitoring,infra-kafka,kafka,mongodb,sm,statscollect'

Compatibility

For Cisco Nexus Dashboard services compatibility information, see the Cisco Data Center Networking Applications Compatibility Matrix.

For Cisco Nexus Dashboard cluster sizing guidelines and the list of supported services for each cluster form factor, see the Nexus Dashboard Cluster Sizing tool.

Physical Nexus Dashboard nodes support Cisco UCS-220-M5 servers.

Physical Nexus Dashboard nodes must be running a supported version of Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC). This release supports CIMC releases 4.2(3b), 4.2(3e), and 4.3(2.230207).

Table 1 Supported UCS server firmware

Product

Supported Releases

UCS server firmware

Cisco UCS-220-M5 servers:

·      4.2(3b)

·      4.2(3e)

·      4.3(2.230207)

Cisco UCS-C220-M3 and earlier servers are not supported for Virtual Nexus Dashboard clusters.

VMware vMotion is not supported for Nexus Dashboard nodes deployed in VMware ESX.

Nexus Dashboard can be claimed in Intersight region 'us-east-1' only, 'eu-central-1' region is not supported.

Browser Compatibility

The Cisco Nexus Dashboard and services UI is intended to be compatible with the most recent desktop version of most common browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. In most cases, compatibility will extend one version behind their most recent release.

While not designed for compatibility with mobile devices, most mobile browsers are still able to render majority of Nexus Dashboard and services UI. However, using the above-listed browsers on a desktop or laptop is recommended. Mobile browsers aren’t officially supported by Cisco Nexus Dashboard and services.

Verified Scalability Limits

The following table lists the maximum verified scalability limits for the Nexus Dashboard platform.

Category

Scale

Nodes in a physical cluster

3 master nodes

4 worker nodes

2 standby nodes

Nodes in a virtual cluster (ESX), Profile 1

3 master nodes (ova-data)

3 worker nodes (ova-app)

2 standby nodes (ova-data)

Nodes in a virtual cluster (ESX), Profile 2

3 master nodes (ova-data)

6 worker nodes (ova-app)

Nodes in a virtual cluster (KVM)

3 master nodes

Nodes in a cloud cluster (AWS or Azure)

3 master nodes

Nodes in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

3 master nodes

Sites per cluster

Depends on the specific services deployed in the cluster:

●      For Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, see the Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Verified Scalability Guide for a specific release.

●      For Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, see the Verified Scalability Guide for Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller for a specific release.

●      For Nexus Dashboard Insights, see the Release Notes for a specific release.

Admin users

50

Operator users

1000

Service instances

4

API sessions

2000 for Nexus Dashboard and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator

100 for Nexus Dashboard Insights

Login domains

8

Clusters connected via multi-cluster connectivity for single pane of glass experience

4

Sites across all clusters within the same single pane of glass experience

12

Related Content

Document

Description

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Release Notes

Provides release information for the Cisco Nexus Dashboard product.

Nexus Dashboard Capacity Planning

Provides cluster sizing guidelines based on the type and number of services you plan to run in your Nexus Dashboard as well as the target fabrics' sizes.

Nexus Dashboard and Services Compatibility Matrix

Provides Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Services compatibility information for specific Cisco Nexus Dashboard, services, and fabric versions.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Hardware Setup Guide for UCS-C220-M5 Servers

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Hardware Setup Guide for UCS-C225-M6 Servers

Provides information on physical server specifications and installation.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Deployment Guide

Provides information on Cisco Nexus Dashboard software deployment.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

User Guide

Describes how to use Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Services APIs

API reference for the Nexus Dashboard and services.

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