Overview to Cisco VIM Unified Management

Cisco VIM Unified Management is an optional application, which acts as a single point of management for the Cisco VIM. Inclusive of your Cisco NFVI package, you can use Cisco VIM Unified Management to manage Cisco NFVI for day-0 and day-n and for multi-site and multi-pod management features.

Cisco VIM Unified Management Overview

Cisco VIM provides an Intuitive and easy way to deploy and manage the NFVI platform, reducing user-error and providing visualization deployment to manage multiple Cisco VIM Pods from a single portal. In Cisco VIM 2.2 and higher releases, a light-weight UI which is a dockerized application, supports multi-tenancy with local RBAC support and CiscoVIM Rest layer are integrated. The container-based UI platform manages multiple CiscoVIM pods from day-0, or above in the lifecycle of the cloud.

The following figure shows the architecture of the CiscoVIM UM's interaction with a Pod:
Figure 1. Cisco VIM UM's Interaction with a Pod
The architecture of the CiscoVIM UM is light-weight, hierarchical, and scalable. Each local site is autonomous with localized toolsets. Global Unified Management UI, provides ease of management with multisite and multi-pod capability for distributed NFV deployment at scale. This facility can be used through browsers such as IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Cisco VIM UM by itself, is designed to operate in HA. The platform is a modular, loosely coupled architecture, that provides the capability to manage multiple pods, with RBAC support as depicted in the following figure:
Figure 2. Cisco VIM UM Architecture

Cisco VIM UM can be installed in Standalone or non-HA mode: You can Install in a Standalone or non-HA mode (on the management node of the pod) or a standalone (BOM same as the management node) server. Migrating from one install mode to another can be done effectively as the UI interacts with each Pod through REST API and little RBAC information of the Admin and user is kept in the DB.

The UI has two types of views:

  • UI Admin: UI Admin can add users as UI Admin or Pod Admin.

  • Pod Admin: Pod Admin has the privilege only at the Pod level, unless Pod Admin is also a UI Admin.

Cisco VIM Unified Management Admin UI Overview

Admin UI is responsible for managing the UI and Pod admin, which includes adding and revoking user privileges. Also, the UI Admin can delete an existing Pod from the management pane.

Cisco VIM Unified Management Pod UI Overview

The Pod UI, is responsible for managing each Pod. VIM UM gives easy access to switch between multiple Pods. Through the Pod UI, a Pod Admin can manage users and their respective roles and responsibilities. Also, the Pod UI provides the user to execute day-0 (install) and day-n (Pod management, software update, and so on.) activities seamlessly. ELK, Horizon Web UI, and so on, are also cross-launched and visible for each Pod through the Pod UI.