Contents
Introduction
Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC) is a Virtual Network Functions Manager (VNFM), which performs lifecycle management of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs).
The Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC) promotes agility, flexibility, and programmability in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environments - and offers comprehensive automated lifecycle management capabilities. By design, Cisco ESC is built as an open and a modular system. It provides a single point of control to manage all aspects of VNF lifecycle for generic virtual network functions (VNFs) in a dynamic environment. Drawing on industry standards and open APIs, you can control the full lifecycle of all of your virtualized resources, whether using Cisco or third-party VNFs, allowing you to choose best-of-breed industry solutions.
As part of the Cisco Orchestration Suite, ESC is packaged with Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), and available within Cisco Solutions such as Virtual Managed Services (vMS).
As a standalone product, ESC is available as a Virtual Network Function Manager bundled with several Cisco VNFs such as VPN, vRouter and many others.
Supported Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIM)
ESC supports lifecycle management of VNF on OpenStack and VMware vCenter. For more details, see the Installation Scenarios chapter in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.
New Features and Enhancements of 2.3
This section describes the features added in Cisco Elastic Services Controller Release 2.3.
For more information on ESC 2.3 features, see the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide, and Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.
Monitoring the Health of ESC—ESC provides REST API for any third party software to monitor the health of ESC and key services within ESC. Using the API, the third party software can query the health condition of ESC periodically to check whether ESC is in service. For more information, see the Monitoring the Health of ESC section in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
no_vim_credentials—New bootvm.py script argument to deploy ESC without passing VIM credentials. These credentials can later be configured through the REST or NETCONF APIs.
For more information, see the Cisco Elastic Services Controller Installer Arguments section in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.
Enhancement to the Existing Deployment—ESC now supports updating interface (port group) name on VMware vCenter in an existing deployment via API (REST or NETCONF) and ESC portal.
For more information, see the Updating an Existing Deployment section in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Custom Script Notification—ESC now supports sending generic notifications to northbound about custom script execution status of the deployment at a certain lifecycle stage. ESC can determine the progress of the script execution through this notification. For more information, see the Custom Script Notification in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Reboot time—A reboot time parameter is introduced to provide more granular control on the reboot wait time of recovery. For more information, see the Deploying Virtual Network Functions section in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Assigning MAC Address from the MAC Address Pool (VMware vCenter)—ESC deployment on VMware vCenter supports assigning MAC address using the MAC address range, or MAC address list from the MAC address pool to deploy VMs to the network. For more information, see the Deploying VNFs on VMware vCenter in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Configuring VIM Credentials—If ESC was deployed without passing VIM credentials, you can configure these credentials using the REST or NETCONF APIs. For more information, see the Configuring OpenStack credentials section in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.
Reconfiguring ESC Virtual Machine—ESC now allows you to reconfigure Rsyslog, NTP, DNS, Hosts, and Time Zone after booting the machine. For more information, see the Reconfiguring ESC VM section in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.
In-Service HA Upgrade—The In-Service upgrade allows ESC HA cluster to upgrade one node at a time with minimum service interruption. This is supported on OpenStack only. For more information, see the In-Service Upgrade Procedures for ESC HA on OpenStack section in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide .
Deprecated Features
Cisco ESC Release 2.1 and later does not support the service registration attributes for VNF deployment. For more information, see the, Cisco Elastic Services Controller Deployment Attributes.
Cisco Elastic Services Controller Bugs
For a complete list of open and resolved bugs for this release, use the Cisco Bug Search tool.
Open Bugs
The table below lists the open issues in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller 2.3 release.
Table 1 Open Bugs in Cisco Elastic Services Controller 2.3 Bug ID
Description
Recovery failure - service alive should be sent after recovery complete.
Service is Active/UP, but two VMs (2 and 7) are not Active.
Resolved Bugs
The table below lists the key issues resolved in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller 2.3 release.
Table 2 Resolved Bugs in Cisco Elastic Services Controller 2.3 Bug ID
Description
Standby ESC outputs esc ui error continuously.
ESC does not delete VM properly with compute node shutdown.
Deployment operation data remained.
Pending REST requests may result in stuck resources after failover.
Some undeploy may fail due to concurrent issue.
Cisco Bug Search Tool
ProcedureBug Search Tool (BST), the online successor to Bug Toolkit, is designed to improve our customers' effectiveness in network risk management and device troubleshooting.
BST allows partners and customers to search for software bugs based on product, release, and keyword, and aggregates key data such as bug details, product, and version. The service has provision to filter bugs based on credentials to provide external and internal bug views for the search input.
To use the BST to search for a specific bug or to search for all bugs in a release:
Step 1 Go to http://tools.cisco.com/bugsearch. Step 2 At the Log In screen, enter your registered Cisco.com username and password; then, click Log In. The Bug Search page opens.
Note If you do not have a Cisco.com username and password, you can register for them at http://tools.cisco.com/RPF/register/register.do.
Step 3 To search for a specific bug, enter the bug ID in the Search For field and press Return. Step 4 To search for bugs in the current release:
In the Search For field, enter a keyword and press Return. (Leave the other fields empty).
When the search results are displayed, use the filter tools to find the types of bugs you are looking for. You can search for bugs by modified date, status, severity, and so forth.
Tip To export the results to a spreadsheet, click the Export All to Spreadsheet link.
See Bug Search Tools & Resources on Cisco.com. For more details on the tool overview and functionalities, check out the help page, located at http://www.cisco.com/web/applicat/cbsshelp/help.html
Accessibility Features in Cisco ESC
For a list of accessibility features in Cisco ESC 2.3, see Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) on the Cisco website, or contact accessibility@cisco.com.
All product documents are accessible except for images, graphics, and some charts. If you would like to receive the product documentation in audio format, braille, or large print, contact accessibility@cisco.com.
Related Documentation
The following documents are available for Cisco Elastic Services Controller:
Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide
Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide
Cisco Elastic Services Controller REST API Guide
Cisco Elastic Services Controller NETCONF API Guide
Cisco Elastic Services Controller Deployment Attributes
You can access the documents at:
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