First Published: March 16, 2020

Introduction

This document provides information regarding Cisco WAN Automation Engine (Cisco WAE) Release 7.2.1 and related patches.

Cisco WAN Automation Engine (WAE) provides the tools to create and maintain a model of the current network through the continual monitoring and analysis of the network and the traffic demands that are placed on it. This network model contains all relevant information about a network at a given time, including topology, configuration, and traffic information. You can use this information as a basis for analyzing the impact on the network due to changes in traffic demands, paths, node and link failures, network optimizations, or other changes.

The Cisco WAE platform is an open, programmable framework that interconnects software modules, communicates with the network, and provides APIs to interface with external applications.

This document contains the following topics:

Release Information for Cisco WAE 7.2.1 Patch 1

This section provides information related to Cisco WAE Release 7.2.1 Patch 1 and contains the following topics:

Install Cisco WAE 7.2.1 Patch 1

This procedure outlines the steps necessary to upgrade to Cisco WAE 7.2.1 Patch 1:

Before you begin

Download and verify the digitally signed Cisco WAE 7.2.1 Patch 1 image. See Verify WAE Image

Procedure

Step 1

Stop WAE services using supervisor.

supervisorctl stop wae:*
Step 2

Change permission of the install file using the command:

chmod 755 wae-linux-v7.2.1-patch1.bin
Step 3

Install Cisco WAE 7.2.1 Patch 1 using the following command:

# ./wae-linux-v7.2.1-patch1.bin  [-i WAE_INSTALL_DIR] [-r WAE_RUN_DIR] [-b BACKUP_DIR]

where

WAE_INSTALL_DIR is the WAE install directory path.

WAE_RUN_DIR is the run directory path.

BACKUP_DIR is the backup directory to use when creating the patch.

Note 
During the backup phase of WAE installation, you may see a few messages on the terminal like:
cp: cannot stat …

This is expected and does not cause any problems with the patch install.
Step 4

Start WAE services using supervisor:

supervisorctl start wae:*
Step 5

Confirm that all WAE services are running:

supervisorctl status
Step 6

On the WAE CLI, run:

admin@wae# packages reload
Note 

After installation of the patch, use the new version of Cisco WAE Design (WAE-Design-k9-7.2.1-patch1-Linux-x86_64.signed.bin) that is available for download for all platforms. Verify the signed image before installing. See Cisco WAE Design 7.2.1 GUI Installation Guide.

After applying Cisco WAE 7.2.1 Patch 1, a few error messages are captured in the java log files. These error messages can be safely ignored and no WAE functionality is affected.

Step 7

(Optional) If license_install tool was run previously from within the WAE install directory <WAE_INSTALL_DIR>, then run the license_install tool once again after installing this patch.

Resolved Bugs

The following are descriptions of the resolved bugs in Cisco WAE Release 7.2.1 Patch 1:

Table 1. Resolved Bugs

Bug ID

Description

CSCvs18201

Unable to collect Inventory for Huawei VRP 5 and CPU/MEM for VRP 8

CSCvs52155

VPN traffic measured not populated

CSCvs70239

Aggregation of network demand hangs preventing any further aggregation from running

CSCvs95132

DNF Netflow NIMO throws "java.lang.NullPointerException" error during nimo execution

CSCvt19325

In WAE 7.2.1, IP address information is lost from Interfaces table after DARE aggregation

CSCvs50959

In WAE 7.2.1, Optical NIMO creates too many files in /tmp

CSCvs58735

login-find-multicast-nimo fails with "Python cb_action" error

CSCvs59422

Unable to change enabled field from config UI

CSCvs68767

Intermittent DARE aggregation error and failure

CSCvs70134

Virtual nodes shown as type physical

CSCvs70161

In WAE 7.2.1, cisco-wae-archive fills the wae-python-vm.log

CSCvs70758

WAE 7.1.2 to WAE 7.2.1 upgrade migraton script fails

CSCvs77750

In WAE 7.1.3 Patch 3, lsp-snmp-nimo is shown as as Unrouted

CSCvs93391

WAE does not resolve interface name on IPv6 ALU devices

CSCvs95445

In WAE 7.1.3 Patch 3, cfg_parse timeout occurs when traffic-poller begins/is running

CSCvs44588

Update/Return license reservation APIs throw "classcast exception" error after agent restart

CSCvs29335

Layout NIMO does not copy SRLGs from the template

Release Information for Cisco WAE 7.2.1

This section provides information related to Cisco WAE Release 7.2.1 and contains the following topics:

What’s New in Cisco WAE 7.2.1

The following features are new in Cisco WAE 7.2.1

Feature Description

Smart Licensing

Cisco WAE now supports both Cisco Smart Licensing and traditional licensing. Cisco Smart Licensing is a standardized licensing platform that enables you to automate time consuming manual licensing tasks, track the status of your license and software usage trends.

Some of the benefits that Cisco Smart Licensing offers are:

  • Visibility to devices and software purchased and deployed

  • Ability to monitor and manage devices, licenses, and usage in real time

  • Automatic license activation

  • Product simplicity with standard software offers, licensing platform, and policies

  • Decreased operational costs

WAE UI → Smart Licensing is added to enable you to configure and manage all details related to smart licenses.

For more information, see "Cisco Smart Licensing" chapter in the Cisco WAE 7.2.1 User Guide.

HA with automatic failover

Cisco WAE now supports High Availability (HA) with automatic failover. If a primary node fails, the secondary node takes over as Master node.

WAE UI → HA configuration page is updated to enable you to configure master and slave nodes.

For more information, see "Administration" chapter ("Configure High Availability" topic) in the Cisco WAE 7.2.1 User Guide.

Online Help

Cisco WAE now comes with embedded online help. Use the Help button on WAE UI to access the related help topics.

Note 

Documents are sometimes updated after original publication. Refer to the Cisco WAE 7.2.1 User Guide document on Cisco.com for latest updates.

Changeover tool enhancements

The Changeover tool is enhanced to allow you to group Interface Metric changes together into steps. You can:

  • Group parallel interfaces metric changes together.

  • Group interface metric changes from the same source if there is no impact to maximum utilization.

For more information, see "Changeover" chapter ("Running the Changeover Tool" topic) in the Cisco WAE Design 7.2.1 User Guide.

Enhancement to SR policy modelling to support multiple candidate path

SR policy is enhanced to support multiple candidate path along with preference.

If an SR LSP contains multiple SR Candidate paths, the demand is routed on the LSP path with the highest preference option for which the demand can be routed from source to destination.

For more information, see "Segment Routing Simulation" chapter ("SR LSP Routing" topic) in the Cisco WAE Design 7.2.1 User Guide.

RSVP-TE Optimization Tool enhancemets

In Cisco WAE Design, the RSVP-TE Optimization Tool is enhanced to allow you to set avoidance constraints.

Navigate to Tools → RSVP LSP Optimization → RSVP-TE Opt. Avoid Objects section in the Advanced tab lets you to select Nodes, Interfaces, L1 Links, L1 Nodes, SRLGs to be avoided when optimizing LSPs.

For more information, see "RSVP-TE Optimization" chapter ("Optimization Input" topic) in the Cisco WAE Design 7.2.1 User Guide.

WAE Live Database management

Cisco WAE Live database management now provides you with the following options:

  • Manage database space by the age of the record.

  • Manage database space by the % of the disk capacity.

The dependency on Oracle Java is also removed.

For more information, see "Performing Administrative Tasks" chapter ("Database Management" topic) in the Cisco WAE Live 7.2.1 User Guide.

Inventory data collection timestamp

On WAE Live → Inventory page, the Table view is updated to include Last Collected field at the bottom of the page which displays the date and time of last collected data.

For more information, see "Viewing Inventory" chapter ("Viewing the Inventory Table" topic) in the Cisco WAE Live 7.2.1 User Guide.

Digital Signing

Cisco WAE software (including WAE Design and WAE Live) now come with digital signatures. The verifiable digital signatures ensure that the Cisco WAE software running on your systems is secure and has not been tampered with, and that the software originated from a trusted source.

For more information, see Cisco WAE 7.2.1 Installation Guide and Cisco WAE Design 7.2.1 GUI Installation Guide.

Enhancement to SR policy modelling to support multiple SID type

Cisco WAE is now updated to support additional SID types - Interfaces, Nodes, Node Groups, LSPs.

Cisco WAE scaling

WAE is now enhanced to support 3000 nodes for modeling, simulation and optimization.

EPNM 3.0 support for optical collection

WAE now supports EPNM 3.0 with NCS2K (11.0/11.1).

WAE performance improvements

NIMOs are now enhanced to support native format.

Inter AS BGP enhancement

AS-merge is enhanced to handle dropped demands.

WMD - Increase in robustness

Performance of WMD interacting with SAGE is improved.

Upgrade to Cisco WAE 7.2.1

Follow the below workflow to install or upgrade to Cisco WAE 7.2.1:

Install and Configure Supervisor

Install and configure supervisor before installing WAE.


Note

The following configuration steps work only when supervisor is installed using yum. If supervisor is installed using any other method, it has to be configured to run supervisorctl as a non root user.

Procedure
Step 1

Install supervisor and verify.

sudo yum install -y epel-release
sudo yum install -y supervisor
supervisord -version
3.1.4
Step 2

Create directories with write permissions for the OS user running WAE.

sudo mkdir -p /opt/supervisor/run
sudo mkdir -p /opt/supervisor/log
sudo chown -R [USER-NAME]:[GROUP-NAME] /opt/supervisor
Step 3

Update supervisor configuration to not run as a root user.

Point the pid file to /opt/supervisor/run/supervisor.pid and user as the OS user running WAE.

Open /etc/supervisord.conf as root and edit.

  • In the [unix_http_server] section:

    - Change ;file=/var/run/supervisor/supervisor.sock to file=/opt/supervisor/run/supervisor.sock

    - Change ;chown=nobody:nogroup to chown=[USER-NAME]:[GROUP-NAME]

  • In the [supervisord] section:

    - Change ;logfile=/var/log/supervisor/supervisord.log to logfile=/opt/supervisor/log/supervisord.log.

    - Change ;pidfile=/var/run/supervisord.pid to pidfile=/opt/supervisor/run/supervisord.pid

    - Change ;minfds=1024 to minfds=1000000

    - Change ;minprocs=200 to minprocs=257805

    Note 

    Do not set the user under the [supervisord] section.

  • In the [supervisorctl] section:

    - Change ;serverurl=unix:///var/run/supervisor/supervisor.sock to serverurl=unix:///opt/supervisor/run/supervisor.sock
Step 4

Start Supervisor.

sudo systemctl start supervisord
supervisorctl status all
Step 5

Enable supervisor to start during system startup.

sudo systemctl enable supervisord
sudo systemctl status supervisord

Verify WAE Image

Procedure
Step 1

Download the Cisco WAE 7.2.1 software package from Cisco Download Software site.

Step 2

The certificate and digital signature are both embedded in the downloaded file - wae-linux-v7.2.1.signed.bin.

Step 3

Run the self-extracting signed binary. This extracts the Release Binary and validates using the signature file.

Verification of signed image

[admin@wae-vm-21 workspace.signed]$ ./wae-linux-v7.2.1.signed.bin
Unpacking...
Verifying signature...
Downloading CA certificate from http://www.cisco.com/security/pki/certs/crcam2.cer ...
Successfully downloaded and verified crcam2.cer.
Downloading SubCA certificate from http://www.cisco.com/security/pki/certs/innerspace.cer ...
Successfully downloaded and verified innerspace.cer.
Successfully verified root, subca and end-entity certificate chain.
Successfully fetched a public key from WAE-CCO_RELEASE.cer.
Successfully verified the signature of wae-linux-v7.2.1.bin using WAE-CCO_RELEASE.cer
Step 4

The generated wae-linux-v7.2.1.bin is the Linux installer for WAE.

Install Cisco WAE

Before you begin

  • If one does not yet exist, create a UNIX user (assigned to a group). You must be this UNIX user to run installation.

  • Make sure supervisor is installed and configured. See Install and Configure Supervisor.

  • Download and verify the digitally signed Cisco WAE 7.2.1 image. See Verify WAE Image.

  • Make sure Java-8 is installed on the system and JAVA_HOME environment variable is pointing to jdk-1.8.

  • Make sure that requests.auth python package is installed for the BW-OPT application to function in WAE.

  • For migrating the existing 7.1.x configurations to 7.2.1 please go through the README file provided with “Cisco WAE upgrade script for migrating configurations from WAE 7.1.x to WAE 7.2.1” package from CCO.

Procedure
Step 1

Stop WAE if running.
Step 2

Change permission of the install file using the command:

chmod +x wae-linux-v7.2.1.bin
Step 3

Run the installer specifying the target directory.

./wae-linux-v7.2.1.bin <wae-dir>
Step 4

Setup environment and create a runtime directory specifying the path.

cd  <wae-dir>
source waerc
wae-setup --dest <target-runtime-dir>
Step 5

You are prompted to set the Cisco WAE admin password.

WAE admin password:
Confirm password:
Step 6

After installing and setting up wae (i.e. after running wae-setup), create a soft link to the wae.ini file from inside /etc/supervisord.d/ and add WAE config to supervisor. 

sudo ln -sf <target-runtime-dir>/wae.ini /etc/supervisord.d/
Note 

Execute this step only after supervisor is installed and configured.
Step 7

Update supervisor configuration.

supervisorctl update
Step 8

Start WAE process 

supervisorctl start wae:*
wae:zookeeper: started
wae:waectl: started
wae:kafka: started
wae:wae-monitor: started
Note 

  • wae:waectl is the WAE program.

  • wae:kafka and wae:zookeeper are required for traffic collection.

  • wae:wae-monitor is the monitoring service.

  • wae:logrotate is for log rotation.

Step 9

Check status of WAE process

supervisorctl status
wae:kafka RUNNING pid 1540, uptime 28 days, 14:03:40
wae:logrotate RUNNING pid 1178, uptime 28 days, 15:10:11
wae:wae-monitor RUNNING pid 11520, uptime 0:00:12
wae:waectl RUNNING pid 1177, uptime 28 days, 15:10:11
wae:zookeeper RUNNING pid 1736, uptime 28 days, 14:03:39
Note 

To stop all WAE process, use the command:

supervisorctl stop wae:*

Supported Node Versions

The following table lists the supported node versions for Cisco WAE 7.2.1

Table 2. Supported Node Versions for Cisco WAE 7.2.1

Feature

Product

Tested with version

Notes

SRTM

IOS-XR

6.6.2 + SMU, 6.5.3 + SMU

Netconf LSP

IOS-XR

6.5.1

NED Version: ncs-4.7.4-cisco-iosxr-7.11.1

IOS-XR

15.3

NED Version: ncs-4.7.4-cisco-ios-6.22.1

Juniper Junos

Mx960

18.1R1.9

NED Version: ncs-4.7.1-juniper-junos-4.1

RT Apps, Multi XTC, Reactive polling.

IOS-XR

6.6.2 + SMU, 6.5.3 + SMU

Multilayer

NCS2K

10.9, 11.0

EPNM

3.0.3

Resolved Bugs

The following are descriptions of the resolved bugs in Cisco WAE Release 7.2.1:

Table 3. Resolved Bugs

Bug ID

Description

CSCvn17584

Running topo-vpn-nimo to discover L3 and L2 VPNs in a network results in error.

CSCvp60520

Unable to keep active connection with XTC.

CSCvp62803

WMD does not get traffic from traffic-poll-nimo.

CSCvq34672

rpc-error occurs on downloading .pln file from WMD using WAE-Design.

CSCvq36413

'Traffic fitting failed error' message displayed during Demand Deduction.

CSCvq54725

Interfaces with Util Sim higher than 100% due to demands coming from netflow.

CSCvq59755

'Bad file descriptor' error message is displayed when external-executable-nimo is executed.

CSCvq70190

zookeperctl.out file is filled up with a lot of messages.

CSCvq74682

WAE High Availability does not work as expected.

CSCvq79488

Java Exception in topo-igp - Out Of Memory.

CSCvq86258

WAE XTC agent keeps multiple connections with XTC and is not consuming the information sent by XTC, increasing XTC memory usage.

CSCvq87842

topo-bgp-nimo collection is unable to complete the upload to CDB due to "Invalid Value" error for peer-id.

CSCvr09357

traffic-demands-nimo is not executed at regular intervals and at times it is not executed correctly.

CSCvr12252

The final network model does not have the layout coming from layout-nimo. It gets corrupted.

CSCvr85317

The DARE aggregation fails after few hours.

CSCvr86225

wae.log captures many CRIT errors showing instabilities in the processes and results in WAE restarting. /tmp folder get filled upto 100% when topo-vpn-nimo is executed.

CSCvm34065

DARE does not process changes, displays 'Queue full' error message.

CSCvm57253

Packages reload when simultaneous collections are scheduled.

CSCvn49160

Following error is seen while loading plan file with L1 and L3 information:

wae@wae# wae components load-plan run plan-file /home/wae/bonn-agg_v30.pln network-name bonn-archive
Error: Python cb_action error. external error (19): Error on line 588: unknown element: dispaly-name

CSCvo78480

DARE rebuild creates another DARE network when one network gets sourced to multiple DARE network.

CSCvq01121

The traffic balance of external endpoint member is rounded off when a plan file is imported.

CSCvq26753

WAE DARE does not consolidate NIMOs when node-filter configuration is changed

CSCvq38200

inter-as-nimo deletes ASes previously merged from newly merged plan files that are not related to the other merges.

CSCvq39102

login_test and snmp_test tools are not packaged with WAE collector.

CSCvq53205

Supervisorctl file limits need to be increased at Install time.

CSCvq54298

WAE is unable to discover Huawei CX600 boxes and hardware inventory

CSCvq56906

Intermittent Failures while writing plan files to Archives.

CSCvr51385

Maximum opened files option in netflow agent or flow collector tools is always set to 4096 when WAE is started using supervisorctl.

CSCvr84760

Kafka issue impacting multiple components.

CSCvp44310

WAE Design application is slow to recompute simulated traffic numbers when the Multicast tables are included.

CSCvq57634

On WAE Design, Save to -> Template option must be enhanced to allow the operator to update layout-nimo template file directly to WAE Server.

CSCvq84759

Introduce NetIntHistory details in the output plan file.

CSCvr24303

On WAE Design, introduce Save option to WAE server to improve performance.

CSCvr38394

When trying to execute run-config-parse, WAE fails with illegal reference error for p2mp-lsp-name.

Documentation

To find descriptions of all related Cisco WAE documentation, see Documentation Roadmap.


Note
We sometimes update the documentation after original publication. Therefore, you should always review the documentation on Cisco.com for any updates.

Filing a Cisco WAE Bug

While filing CDETS for Cisco WAE, make sure the following information is captured:

  • WAE configuration: supervisord configuration, aggregator configuration and the nimo configuration of concerned network and its source-network, if any.

  • <run-dir>/logs/ directory

  • Plan file(s) for the network(s) of concern

  • <run-dir>/data/stats/ for system stability and resource usage related issues

  • <run-dir>/work/dare/ for aggregation related issues.

  • <run-dir>/data/networks/*.db for issues related to networks configured as ‘native’ and the corresponding aggregator (final-network).

  • CDB dump of the networks of concern for networks of ‘yang’ format (‘yang’ is the default storage-format).

  • Configuration corresponding to the component of concern. Eg: WMD, archive etc.

  • For collection issues, record file(s) if the nimo supports record-playback.

  • ~/.cariden/logs/ for designapid related issues.

Using the Cisco Bug Search Tool

You can use the Cisco Bug Search Tool to search for a specific bug or to search for all bugs in a release.

Procedure

Step 1

Go to the http://tools.cisco.com/bugsearch.

Step 2

Enter your registered Cisco.com username and password, and click Log In.

The Bug Search page opens.

Note 
If you do not have a Cisco.com username and password, you can http://tools.cisco.com/RPF/register/register.do.
Step 3

Use any of these options to search for bugs, and then press Enter (Return) to initiate the search:

  • To search for a specific bug, enter the bug ID in the Search For field.

  • To search for bugs based on specific criteria, enter search criteria, such as a problem description, a feature, or a product name, in the Search For field.

  • To search for bugs based on products, enter or select a product from the Product list. For example, if you enter “WAE,” you get several options from which to choose.

  • To search for bugs based on releases, in the Releases list select whether to search for bugs affecting a specific release, bugs that were fixed in a specific release, or both. Then enter one or more release numbers in the Releases field.

Step 4

When the search results are displayed, use the filter tools to narrow the results. You can filter the bugs by status, severity, and so on.

To export the results to a spreadsheet, click Export Results to Excel.