This document describes the features, issues, and deployment guidelines for Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator software.

Cisco Multi-Site is an architecture that allows you to interconnect separate Cisco APIC, Cloud Network Controller (formerly known as Cloud APIC), and NDFC (formerly known as DCNM) domains (fabrics) each representing a different region. This helps ensure multitenant Layer 2 and Layer 3 network connectivity across sites and extends the policy domain end-to-end across the entire system.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator is the intersite policy manager. It provides single-pane management that enables you to monitor the health of all the interconnected sites. It also allows you to centrally define the intersite configurations and policies that can then be pushed to the different Cisco APIC, Cloud Network Controller, or DCNM fabrics, which in term deploy them in those fabrics. This provides a high degree of control over when and where to deploy the configurations.

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

August 20, 2023

Additional open issue CSCwf95524.

March 31, 2023

Release 4.1(1k) became available.

This release provides support for Cisco Cloud Network Controller release 26.0(1) with increased multi-cloud and hybrid cloud scale as listed in the Cloud Network Controller Verified Scalability Guide.

February 2, 2023

Release 4.1(1i) became available.

New Software Features

This release adds the following new features:

Product Impact

Feature

Description

Base Functionality

L3Out for IP and SR-MPLS Handoff for VNF/WAN and Routing Protocols

A new template type and workflow have been added to allow complete L3Out and SR-MPLS L3Out configuration directly from your Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.

For more information, see the “Configuring External Connectivity” chapter of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Configuration Guide for ACI Fabrics.

FEX Interface Configuration from NDO

You can now configure FEX interfaces directly from your Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.

For more information, see the “Fabric Management” chapter of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Configuration Guide for ACI Fabrics.

Breakout Port Configuration from NDO

You can now configure breakout port settings directly from your Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.

For more information, see the “Fabric Management” chapter of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Configuration Guide for ACI Fabrics.

MCP Global policy Configuration from NDO

You can now configure the global MCP policy directly from your Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.

For more information, see the “Fabric Management” chapter of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Configuration Guide for ACI Fabrics.

L3 Domain Configuration

You can now configure L3 Domains directly from your Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.

For more information, see the “Fabric Management” chapter of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Configuration Guide for ACI Fabrics.

Interoperability

NDO-NDFC Hybrid Cloud Support for AWS and Azure

This release adds support for configuring intersite connectivity for hybrid cloud use cases between Cisco NDFC and Cisco Cloud Network Controller fabrics.

For more information, see Hybrid Cloud Connectivity Deployment for Cisco NX-OS.

Performance and Scalability

Five Node Service Graph Support

The scale limit for the number of service graph nodes has been increased to 5.

For information, see the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Verified Scalability Guide and the Cisco ACI Multi-Site and Service Node Integration White Paper.

Ease of Use

New Look and Feel

The Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator 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.

New Hardware Features

There is no new hardware supported in this release.

The complete list of supported hardware is available in the “Deploying Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator” chapter of the Cisco Multi-Site Deployment Guide.

Changes in Behavior

●     For all new deployments, you must install Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator service in Nexus Dashboard 2.3(1) or later.

●     If you are upgrading from a release prior to release 4.0(1), you must back up your configuration, remove the existing Orchestrator instance, deploy this release, and then restore the configuration backup from your existing cluster.

Ensure that you follow the complete upgrade prerequisites, guidelines, and procedure are described in detail in the “Upgrading Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator” chapter of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Deployment Guide.

●     Downgrading from this release is not supported.

We recommend creating a full backup of the configuration before upgrading to Release 4.1(x), so that if you ever want to downgrade, you can deploy a brand-new cluster using an earlier version and then restore your configuration in it.

●     Beginning with Release 4.0(1), the “Application Profiles per Schema” scale limit has been removed.

For the full list of maximum verified scale limits, see the Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Verified Scalability Guide.

●     Beginning with Release 4.0(1), if you have route leaking configured for a VRF, you must delete those configurations before you delete the VRF or undeploy the template containing that VRF.

●     Beginning with Release 4.0(1), if you are configuring EPG Preferred Group (PG), you must explicitly enable PG on the VRF.

In prior releases, enabling PG on an EPG automatically enabled the configuration on the associated VRF. For detailed information on configuring PG in Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, see the “EPG Preferred Group” chapter of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Configuration Guide for ACI Fabrics.

●     When deploying a subset of template policies, such as after a configuration change or update, the deployment time has been significantly improved.

●     Beginning with Cisco Cloud APIC release 25.0(5), Cisco Cloud APIC is renamed as Cisco Cloud Network Controller.

Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator can manage Cloud Network Controller sites the same way it managed Cloud APIC sites previously. For the full list of service and fabric compatibility options, see the Nexus Dashboard and Services Compatibility Matrix.

Open Issues

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

Bug ID

Description

Exists in

CSCvo84218

When service graphs or devices are created on Cloud APIC by using the API and custom names are specified for AbsTermNodeProv and AbsTermNodeCons, a brownfield import to the Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator will fail.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvo20029

Contract is not created between shadow EPG and on-premises EPG when shared service is configured between Tenants.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvn98355

Inter-site shared service between VRF instances across different tenants will not work, unless the tenant is stretched explicitly to the cloud site with the correct provider credentials. That is, there will be no implicit tenant stretch by Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvt06351

Deployment window may not show all the service graph related config values that have been modified.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvt00663

Deployment window may not show all the cloud related config values that have been modified.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvt41911

After brownfield import, the BD subnets are present in site local and not in the common template config

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvt44081

In shared services use case, if one VRF has preferred group enabled EPGs and another VRF has vzAny contracts, traffic drop is seen.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvt02480

The REST API call "/api/v1/execute/schema/5e43523f1100007b012b0fcd/template/Template_11?undeploy=all" can fail if the template being deployed has a large object count

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvt15312

Shared service traffic drops from external EPG to EPG in case of EPG provider and L3Out vzAny consumer

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvw10432

Two cloud sites (with Private IP for CSRs) with the same InfraVNETPool on both sites can be added to NDO without any infraVNETPool validation.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvy36810

Multiple Peering connections created for 2 set of cloud sites.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvz07639

NSG rules on Cloud EPG are removed right after applying service graph between Cloud EPG and on-premises EPG, which breaks communication between Cloud and on-premises.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCvz77156

Route leak configuration for invalid Subnet may get accepted when Internal VRF is the hosted VRF. There would be fault raised in cAPIC.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwa20994

When downloading external device configuration in Site Connectivity page, all config template files are included instead of only the External Device Config template.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwa23744

Sometimes during deploy, you may see the following error:

invalid configuration CT_IPSEC_TUNNEL_POOL_NAME_NOT_DEFINED

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwa40878

User can not withdraw the hubnetwork from a region if intersite connectivity is deployed.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwa17852

BGP sessions from Google Cloud site to AWS/Azure site may be down due to CSRs being configured with a wrong ASN number.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwa26712

Existing IPSec tunnel state may be affected after update of connectivity configuration with external device.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwa37204

Username and password is not set properly in proxy configuration so a component in the container cannot connect properly to any site.

In addition, external module pyaci is not handling the web socket configuration properly when user and password are provided for proxy configuration.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwc96978

Endpoint from only one cloud site can talk to on-premises endpoint.

This could affect the traffic between sites for the added and deleted subnet endpoints.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwe19848

Intersite traffic between cloud sites may not work because shadow objects are not being properly created.

For example, if you have

●  provider/consumer EPG1 (associated to VRF1) to Contract1 is deployed to capic site1

●  consumer/provider EPG2 (associated to VRF2) to Contract1 is deployed to capic site2

You may notice that shadow VRF2 is missing on site1 and shadow VRF1 is missing on site2

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwe19071

If the IP address of a site managed by NDO is not reachable when you attempt to deploy or undeploy a Fabric Resources template associated with that site, you may receive the following error:

Failed to connect to APIC. Verify that you are connecting to an APIC. Error message: Post "https://<ip-address>/api/node/mo/uni.json": dial tcp <ip-address>: i/o timeout

When you deploy or undeploy an application template which is associated with the site and stretched to other sites, you may run into an issue that fvRemoteId MOs are not pushed from NDO to the site, which will cause a traffic drop.

4.1(1i) and later

CSCwf95524

In some cases, route redirect is not enabled on service nodes of a graph.

4.1(1i) 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

CSCwc43424

"Same pctag use" fault is seen on APICs.

4.1(1i)

CSCwc13087

MCP Global Configuration policy is missing from NDO.

4.1(1i)

CSCwc13090

MCP strict mode configuration missing in Fabric policy template and is by default configured in non-strict mode.

4.1(1i)

CSCwc70341

"Leak All" option will overwrite internet 0.0.0.0/0 route.

4.1(1i)

CSCwc59046

If there’s vrf-1 and bd-1 (using vrf-1) deployed to sites, then you create vrf-2, change bd-1’s association from vrf-1 to vrf-2, delete vrf-1, and then deploy, NDO rejects the deployment stating that bd-1 is still using vrf-1. In this case, the template changes will not be deployed to the sites.

4.0(3f)

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

CSCvv67993

NDO will not update or delete VRF vzAny configuration which was directly created on APIC even though the VRF is managed by NDO.

CSCvo82001

Unable to download Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator report and debug logs when database and server logs are selected

CSCvo32313

Unicast traffic flow between Remote Leaf Site1 and Remote Leaf in Site2 may be enabled by default. This feature is not officially supported in this release.

CSCvn38255

After downgrading from 2.1(1), preferred group traffic continues to work. You must disable the preferred group feature before downgrading to an earlier release.

CSCvn90706

No validation is available for shared services scenarios

CSCvo59133

The upstream server may time out when enabling audit log streaming

CSCvd59276

For Cisco Multi-Site, Fabric IDs Must be the Same for All Sites, or the Querier IP address Must be Higher on One Site.

The Cisco APIC fabric querier functions have a distributed architecture, where each leaf switch acts as a querier, and packets are flooded. A copy is also replicated to the fabric port. There is an Access Control List (ACL) configured on each TOR to drop this query packet coming from the fabric port. If the source MAC address is the fabric MAC address, unique per fabric, then the MAC address is derived from the fabric-id. The fabric ID is configured by users during initial bring up of a pod site.

In the Cisco Multi-Site Stretched BD with Layer 2 Broadcast Extension use case, the query packets from each TOR get to the other sites and should be dropped. If the fabric-id is configured differently on the sites, it is not possible to drop them.

To avoid this, configure the fabric IDs the same on each site, or the querier IP address on one of the sites should be higher than on the other sites.

CSCvd61787

STP and "Flood in Encapsulation" Option are not Supported with Cisco Multi-Site.

In Cisco Multi-Site topologies, regardless of whether EPGs are stretched between sites or localized, STP packets do not reach remote sites. Similarly, the "Flood in Encapsulation" option is not supported across sites. In both cases, packets are encapsulated using an FD VNID (fab-encap) of the access VLAN on the ingress TOR. It is a known issue that there is no capability to translate these IDs on the remote sites.

CSCvi61260

If an infra L3Out that is being managed by Cisco Multi-Site is modified locally in a Cisco APIC, Cisco Multi-Site might delete the objects not managed by Cisco Multi-Site in an L3Out.

CSCvq07769

"Phone Number" field is required in all releases prior to Release 2.2(1). Users with no phone number specified in Release 2.2(1) or later will not be able to log in to the GUI when Orchestrator is downgraded to an earlier release.

CSCvu71584

Routes are not programmed on CSR and the contract config is not pushed to the Cloud site.

CSCvw47022

Shadow of cloud VRF may be unexpectedly created or deleted on the on-premises site.

CSCvt47568

Let's say APIC has EPGs with some contract relationships. If this EPG and the relationships are imported into NDO and then the relationship was removed and deployed to APIC, NDO doesn't delete the contract relationship on the APIC.

CSCwa31774

When creating VRFs in infra tenant on a Google Cloud site, you may see them classified as internal VRF in NDO. If you then import these VRFs in NDO, the allowed routeleak configuration will be determined based on whether the VRF is used for external connectivity (external VRF) or not (internal VRF).

This is because on cAPIC, VRFs in infra tenant can fall into 3 categories: internal, external and un-decided.

NDO treats infra tenant VRFs as 2 categories for simplicity: internal and external.

There is no usecase impacted because of this.

CSCwa47934

Removing site connectivity or changing the protocol is not allowed between two sites.

CSCwa52287

Template goes to approved state when the number of approvals is fewer than the required number of approvers.

CSCvz08520

Missing BD1/VRF1 in site S2 will impact the forwarding from EPG1 in site S1 to EPG1/EPG2 in site S2

CSCvy31532

After a site is re-registered, NDO may have connectivity issues with APIC or CAPIC

CSCwc62636

If cloud sites have EVPN-based connectivity with another cloud or on-premises site, then contract-based routing must be enabled for intersite traffic to work.

CSCwc59208

When APIC-owned L3Outs are deleted manually on APIC by the user, stretched and shadow InstP belonging to the L3Outs get deleted as expected. However, when deploying the template from NDO, only the stretched InstPs detected in config drift will get deployed.

CSCwc52360

When using APIs, template names must not include spaces.

CSCwa87027

After unmanaging an external fabric that contains route-servers, Infra Connectivity page in NDO still shows the route-servers.

Since the route-servers are still maintained, the overlay IFC from the route-servers to any BGW devices in the DCNM are not removed.

Compatibility

This release supports the hardware listed in the “Prerequisites” section of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Deployment Guide.

This release supports Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator deployments in Cisco Nexus Dashboard only.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator can be cohosted with other services in the same cluster. For cluster sizing guidelines, see the Nexus Dashboard Cluster Sizing tool.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator can manage fabrics managed by a variety of controller versions. For fabric compatibility information see the Nexus Dashboard and Services Compatibility Matrix.

Scalability

For Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator verified scalability limits, see Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Verified Scalability Guide.

For Cisco ACI fabrics verified scalability limits, see Cisco ACI Verified Scalability Guides.

For Cisco Cloud ACI fabrics releases 25.0(1) and later verified scalability limits, see Cisco Cloud Network Controller Verified Scalability Guides.

For Cisco NDFC (DCNM) fabrics verified scalability limits, see Cisco NDFC (DCNM) Verified Scalability Guides.

Related Content

For ACI fabrics, see the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) documentation page. On that page, you can use the "Choose a topic" and "Choose a document type” fields to narrow down the displayed documentation list and find a specific document.

For Cloud Network Controller fabrics, see the Cisco Cloud Network Controller documentation page.

For NDFC (DCNM) fabrics, see the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller documentation page.

The following table describes the core Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator documentation.

Document

Description

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Release Notes

Provides release information for the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator 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 Orchestrator Deployment Guide

Describes how to install Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator and perform day-0 operations.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Configuration Guide for ACI Fabrics

Describes Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator configuration options and procedures for fabrics managed by Cisco APIC.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Use Cases for Cloud Network Controller

A series of documents that describe Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator configuration options and procedures for fabrics managed by Cisco Cloud Network Controller.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Configuration Guide for NDFC (DCNM) Fabrics

Describes Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator configuration options and procedures for fabrics managed by Cisco DCNM.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Verified Scalability Guide

Contains the maximum verified scalability limits for this release of Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.

Cisco ACI Verified Scalability Guides

Contains the maximum verified scalability limits for Cisco ACI fabrics.

Cisco Cloud ACI Verified Scalability Guides

Contains the maximum verified scalability limits for Cisco Cloud ACI fabrics.

Cisco NDFC (DCNM) Verified Scalability Guides

Contains the maximum verified scalability limits for Cisco NDFC (DCNM) fabrics.

Cisco ACI YouTube channel

Contains videos that demonstrate how to perform specific tasks in the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator.

Documentation Feedback

To provide technical feedback on this document, or to report an error or omission, send your comments to mailto:apic-docfeedback@cisco.com. We appreciate your feedback.

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