Cisco Elastic Services Controller 3.0 Release Notes
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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 Cisco NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) bundle. This is 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 3.0
This section describes the features added in Cisco Elastic Services Controller Release 3.0.
Multi VIM Deployment—ESC Release 3.0 supports deploying VNFs on multiple VIMs of the same type. ESC supports deploying VNFs on multiple OpenStack VIMs only. This support is not available on VMware vCenter.
To deploy VNFs on multiple VIMs, you must configure the VIM connector and create a tenant within ESC. ESC introduces a locator attribute in each VM group to support multi VIM deployment.
The following key enhancements support multi VIM deployment:
Configuring the VIM Connector—Starting from ESC Release 3.0, you can add multiple VIM connectors, and configure a default VIM connector. You can configure the connector in two ways:
Using bootvm.py—A single VIM connector can be configured using bootvm.py, which becomes the default VIM connector.
VIM Connector APIs—You can now add and delete multiple VIM connectors using the VIM connector API. A default VIM connector is configured to support the ESC Release 2.x and earlier data model.
For more information, see Managing VIM Connectors in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Tenant within ESC—To support multi VIM deployment within a single ESC deployment, a new esc-tenant is created. This tenant is independent and is not mapped to the VIM tenants. For more information, see Managing Tenants in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Locator attribute within the VM Group—ESC Release 3.0 data model provides a locator attribute within each vm group to support multi VIM deployment. For more information, see Deploying VNFs on Multiple OpenStack VIMs in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Out of Band Resource Support—ESC supports only out of band resources (pre-existing resources) such as images, flavors and volumes in a multi VIM deployment. However, ESC allows you to create only ephemeral volumes in a multi VIM environment. For more information, see Deploying VNFs on Multiple OpenStack VIMs in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Update an Existing Multi VIM Deployment—ESC supports updating an existing OpenStack multi VIM deployment. For more information, see Updating an Existing Deployment in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Rules and Policies—The multi VIM deployment supports affinity and anti-affinity rules, and recovery policies. For more information, see Affinity and Anti-Affinity Rules on OpenStack, and Recovery and Redeployment Policies in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Deleting VM Groups in Error State—You can now delete vm groups when the deployment is in an error state by performing a deployment update. For more information, see Updating an Existing Deployment in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Updating the Recovery Policy—You can now update the existing recovery policy while updating a deployment. For more information, see Updating an Existing Deployment in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
- Configuring Custom VM Name—You can now configure custom VM name on the VIM during the deployment time. For more information on customizing VM names, see Configuring Custom VM names in theCisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
ESC Portal—ESC portal is enhanced to provide better look and feel, and improved deployment form and workflow. For more information, see Managing VNFs using ESC Portal in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
SNMP Trap Notifications—ESC now allows to configure notifications on the health of various ESC components via SNMP traps using an SNMP Agent. This agent is installed as part of the standard ESC installation. The SNMP traps currently support only the state of the ESC product and not of the VNFs managed by ESC. For more information on configuring the SNMP agent, see Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
Enhanced escadm Utility—Using the escadm utility, you can now perform more administrative tasks, such as, displaying current ESC configurations in yaml format, start or stop all defined services or manage them individually, verify the VIM settings, and so on. For more details, see the Post Installation Tasks in the Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.
For more information, see the Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide and Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.
Deprecated and Removed Features
Cisco ESC Release 3.0 does not support installing external storage based ESC HA. For more information on the supported HA deployment mechanisms, see Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.
The service registration data model deprecated since last few releases is now removed from ESC Release 3.0. For more information, see Cisco Elastic Services Controller Deployment Attributes.
Cisco ESC Release 3.0 and later does not support the Log (System > Log) and Console view (under Infrastructure > Instances) options in the ESC portal. For more information, see Cisco Elastic Services Controller User Guide.
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 3.0 release.
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).
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 3.0, 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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