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POAP (Power On Auto Provisioning) automates the process of upgrading software images and installing configuration files on Cisco Nexus switches that are being deployed in the network.
When a Cisco Nexus switch with the POAP feature boots and does not find the startup configuration, the switch enters POAP mode, locates the DCNM DHCP server and bootstraps itself with its interface IP address, gateway, and DCNM DNS server IP addresses. It also obtains the IP address of the DCNM server to download the configuration script that is run on the switch to download and install the appropriate software image and device configuration file.
The DCNM 7.0 release will support the web services API for external applications to manage POAP, as an alternate means but similar to how the same API set is used internally by the DCNM GUI for the same functionality. Therefore customers can choose to externally manage POAP programmatically via the DCNM web services APIs, or directly via the DCNM GUI.
Note You will need to install DCNM before running these APIs.
DHCP scope is a well-defined term in DHCP arena. It is used to define a policy for giving out IP addresses and other options to hosts on a specific IP subnet. Here, we use DCHP scope for the POAP function to distribute IPv4 address, default gateway, DNS sever IP address, PYTHON bootscript, TFTP server IP address (or other supported protocol + access credential + server, e.g. http://<dcnm-server-ip>/scripts) which stores the bootscript.
By default, a DHCP scope for the management vlan facing interface (eth1) will be created. For DFA use, it is only required to edit the management vlan facing scope with the corresponding IP address range for the devices management addresses.
This feature allows the user to specify the servers & credentials used to access the device images and the uploaded or DCNM generated/published device configuration. The server serving the images could be different from the one serving the configurations. For the case that the same server is serving both images and configurations, the user is required to provide the server IP address and credentials twice for each server because the root directory holding the images or configuration files could be different. By default, the DCNM server will be the default image and configuration server. There will be two DCNM server addresses, one for config, one for image.
A POAP device requires the following elements to make it work:
– Image information -- the location (server & directory) and name of the device images to use
– Troubleshooting policy – enables debugging and set debugging level, turn-on/off remote logging. It is assumed that the device log will be uploaded to DCNM server.
– Extra misc. CLI commands to be executed before the device reboot
DCNM 7.0 comes pre-packaged with 3 default templates for DFA:
The POAP REST APIs can be used by an external application to manage the servers and files used for Power On Auto Provisioning of the network devices
The POAP REST APIs are mentioned in Table 4-1
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For information on the default configuration profiles in the DCNM DFA package, see Appendix E, “POAP Examples”