Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC) is a Virtual Network Functions Manager (VNFM) managing the lifecycle of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). ESC provides agentless and multi vendor VNF management by provisioning the virtual services. ESC monitors the health of VNFs , promotes agility, flexibility, and programmability in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environments. It provides the flexibility to define rules for monitoring and associate actions that are triggered based on the outcome of these rules. Based on the monitoring results, ESC performs scale in or scale out operations on the VNFs. In the event of a VM failure ESC also supports automatic VM recovery.

ESC fully integrates with Cisco and other third party applications. As a standalone product, the ESC can be deployed as a VNF Manager. ESC integrates with Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) to provide VNF management along with orchestration. As a Specialized Virtual Network Function Manager (SVNFM), ESC tightly integrates with the Cisco Mobility VNFs. ESC can also be utilized as a Generic Virtual Network Function Manager (GVNFM) to provide lifecycle management for both Cisco and third-party VNFs.

ESC as a VNF Manager targets the virtual managed services and all service provider NFV deployments such as virtual packet core, virtual load balancers, virtual security services and so on. Complex services include multiple VMs that are orchestrated as a single service with dependencies between them.