Cisco Nexus Data Broker, Release 3.6, Release Notes

This document describes the features, caveats, and limitations for the Cisco Nexus Data Broker (NDB) software, Release 3.6.

Additional product documentation is listed in the “Related Documentation” section.

Table 1 shows the online change history for this document.

Table 1 Online History Change

Contents

This document includes the following sections:

·       Introduction

·       Compatibility Information

·       Usage Guidelines

·       Verified Scalability Limits

·       New and Changed Information

·       Caveats

·       Related Documentation

Introduction

Visibility into application traffic is important for infrastructure operations to maintain security and compliance, and to perform resource planning and troubleshooting. With the technological advances and growth in cloud-based applications, it has become imperative to gain increased visibility into the network traffic. Traditional approaches to gain visibility into network traffic are expensive and rigid, making it difficult for managers of large-scale deployments.

Cisco Nexus Data Broker (NDB) with Cisco Nexus Switches provides a software-defined, programmable solution to aggregate copies of network traffic using SPAN or network taps for monitoring and visibility. As opposed to traditional network taps and monitoring solutions, this packet-brokering approach offers a simple, scalable and cost-effective solution well-suited for customers who need to monitor higher-volume and business-critical traffic for efficient use of security, compliance, and application performance monitoring tools.

Cisco NDB also provides a software-defined, programmable solution to perform inline inspection of the network traffic for monitoring and visibility purpose. Inline traffic inspection is performed on specific traffic by redirecting it through multiple security tools before it enters or exits a network.

New and Changed Information

This section lists the new and changed features in this release:

·       Support to check consistency for NX-API based devices.

·       Support to configure multiple User Defined Fields (UDFs) in a single filter.

·       Support for IPv6 ethertype for UDF (UDFv6).

·       Default Deny Global ACL for all the ports when switches connected via NX-API.

·       Default Deny ISL ACL for all Inter switch ports when switches connected via NX-API.

·       Cisco NDB now provides an option to estimate data traffic on a connection using dry run feature.

·       Support to purge the device configuration from NDB database while deleting the device and for deleted device.

·       FEX type port is now supported for ACI Span Session source.

·       Support to configure MTU using NDB GUI.

·       During upgrade configured Edge/TAP and Monitor ports will be administratively down and will be made administratively up post upgrade.

·       Multiple device support added to consistency check.

·       Cisco NDB now shows Last Modified By information for the Connection page.

·       Cisco NDB now shows uptime information for NX-API devices on the Consistency Check tab.

·       Support to display Node Name instead of Node ID for Connection Port Statistics information.

·       Cisco NDB now provides an option to clear counters under Connection Port Statistics.

·       Cisco NDB GUI now has smaller icons for monitoring devices in the topology.

·       Support to use Esc key to close a dialog box in Cisco NDB.

Feature Limitations

The following feature limitation apply for the Cisco Nexus Data Broker, Release 3.6:

·       NDB Openflow embedded is not supported on Cisco Nexus 3000/9000 series switches running 7.0(3)I6.1 and 7.0(3)I7.1 NXOS image.

·       Dry Run feature is disabled by default. To enable this feature, see Cisco NDB Configuration Guide.

·       Default deny ACL on all ports and Default ISL deny ACL on ISL ports is enabled by default for Cisco NDB Release 3.6. To disable this feature, please refer the Cisco NDB Release 3.6 Configuration Guide or Cisco NDB 3.6 Deployment Guide.

Usage Guidelines and Limitations

This section lists the usage guidelines and limitations for the Cisco Nexus Data Broker.

■        By default, NDB cluster URL is  https://<NDBIP>:8443.

■        NDB supports Google Chrome version 45.x and later, FireFox version 45.x and later, and Internet Explorer version 11 and later.

■        APIC versions supported are 1.1, 1.2, and 2.0 series.

■        The switchport mode trunk and spanning-tree bpdufilter enable command should be enabled for all the inter-switch ports on all the NDB managed switches.

■       Cisco Nexus Data Broker Embedded will be supported on NxOS 7.0(I4).1 onwards, and 7.0(3)I6.1 onwards. For more information, see the Nexus Data Broker Hardware and Software Interoperability Matrix section.

■        The following features will not be supported in embedded mode deployment of Cisco Nexus Data Broker:

—      Adding another NDB device

—      Adding APIC for ACI SPAN session

—      Adding production device for the SPAN session

—      Configuring SPAN session

—      Configuring copy device

—      Configuring copy sessions

—      Scheduling Configuration Backup

—      NDB High availability is not supported

—      TLS communication between the NDB controller and the switches is not supported

—      Secured communication between the browser and NDB controller is not supported

■        Cisco Nexus switches managed by Cisco Nexus Data Broker in NX-API mode must have LLDP feature enabled. Disabling LLDP may cause inconsistencies and require device rediscovery.

■        When removing devices from the Cisco Nexus Data Broker, the device associated port definitions and connections should be removed first. Otherwise, the device might contain stale configurations created by the Cisco Nexus Data Broker.

■        For secured communication between Nexus Data Broker and Device through HTTPS, start Nexus Data Broker in TLS mode for the first time only. Subsequent NDB restarts does not require TLS mode. For more details, refer to Cisco Nexus Data Broker Configuration Guide.

■        The TLS KeyStore and TrustStore passwords are sent to the Cisco Nexus Data Broker so it can read the password-protected TLS KeyStore and TrustStore files only through HTTPS.

./xnc config-keystore-passwords [--user {user} --password {password} --url {url} --verbose --prompt --keystore-password {keystore_password} --truststore-password {truststore_password}.

Here default URL to be - https://Nexus_Data_Broker_IP:8443

■        A Cisco Nexus Data Broker instance can support either the OpenFlow or NX-API configuration mode, it does not support both configuration modes in the same NDB instance.

■        VLAN based IP filtering is not supported for Nexus Series switch with NxOS version 7.0(3)I6.1. Hence, the filtering fails when you filter the traffic for the following series of switches: 92160YC-X Switch,92300YC Swicth, 9272Q switch, 92304Q Switch, 9236C Switch.

■        For the NDB cluster deployment, the round trip delay across the various servers participating in the cluster should be less than 50 milliseconds. If the round trip delay is more, the NDB cluster behaves unexpectedly. The NDB server round trip delay should be less than 50 ms. If anything above that will have issue in NDB sync up with member servers.

■        Do not configure TACACS on the NDB switches. You can configure it only for authentication and authorization.  Not to be used for accounting.

■        For Cisco NDB Release 3.6, Cisco NX-OS Release versions 7.0(3)I5(1), 7.0(3)I5(2), and 7.0(3)I7(2) are not recommended for NXAPI deployment and Cisco NX-OS Release versions 7.0(3)I5(1) and 7.0(3)I5(2) are not recommended OpenFlow deployments.

Compatibility Information

The 3.6 release supports the following operating systems for the full visibility software sensors:

Table 2 Cisco NDB Compatibility Information

Nexus Data Broker Hardware and Software Interoperability Matrix

The following table lists the hardware and software ineteroperability matrix for NDB Release 3.6.

Table 3 Nexus Data Broker Hardware and Software Interoperability Matrix

7.0(3)I4(1) to 7.0(3)I4(9), 7.0(3)I6(1), 7.0(3)I7(3) to 7.0(3)I7(6), 9.2(1) to 9.2(3).

7.0(3)I4(1) to 7.0(3)I4(9), 7.0(3)I6(1), 7.0(3)I7(2) to 7.0(3)I7(6) , 9.2(1) to 9.2(3).

7.0(3)I4(1) to 7.0(3)I4(9), 7.0(3)I6(1), 7.0(3)I7(2) to 7.0(3)I7(6) , 9.2(1) to 9.2(3).

APIC versions supported on NDB

The following tables provide the APIC versions supported on NDB.

Table 4 APIC versions supported on NDB

Verified Scalability Limits

The following tables provide the scalability limits for  Cisco Nexus Data Broker for Centralized Deployment

Table 5 Scalability Limits for Cisco Nexus Data Broker

Caveats

This section contains lists of open and resolved caveats and known behaviors.

■      Open Caveats

■      Resolved Caveats

■      Known Caveats

Open Caveats

This section lists the open caveats. Click the bug ID to access the Bug Search tool and see additional information about the bug.

Open Caveats in the 3.6 Release

Resolved Caveats

This section lists the resolved caveats. Click the bug ID to access the Bug Search tool and see additional information about the bug.

Resolved Caveats in the 3.6 Release

Known Caveats

This section lists the known caveats from the previous releases. Click the bug ID to access the Bug Search tool and see additional information about the bug.

Known Caveats For Cisco Nexus Data Broker

Related Documentation

The Cisco Nexus Data Broker  documentation can be accessed from the following websites:

Nexus Data Broker Datasheet http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/cloud-systems-management/nexus-data-broker/data_sheet_c78-729452.html

General Documentation: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/cloud-systems-management/nexus-data-broker/tsd-products-support-series-home.html

The documentation includes installation information and release notes.

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