88. Chapter 4 Cloud Portal Cisco Prime Service Catalog
Now we reach chapter number four behind the curtain. And this particular chapter, actually, is a very important chapter where you will learn about the cloud and how we can operate inside the cloud. Because, say, if we’re talking about traditional IT infrastructure, what are the key goals or major steps that we take to get from illegal IT infrastructure to cloud infrastructure? So you’ll find, yeah, to reach the particular cloud, you need consolidation, virtualization, standardization, automation, and orchestration. So, if I count correctly, these are the five main pillars that can be performed to move from a traditional network to fully automate cloud infrastructure, or to move up to the cloud, if that is your goal. Now, if you look at your traditional network or network infrastructure, you’ll notice some sort of consolidation, virtualization, and standardization.
And now people are talking about automation as a way to reduce the overload of manual operations. You can write a script that is assumed to be error-free in order to run and execute the task within the It operations. The next phase is obviously the orchestration. For orchestration, we actually have tools—something called UCS Director. We’ll learn more about UCSDirector in the upcoming sessions. Recordings. Okay, but this is the overall goal: to reach from the traditional network up to the cloud infrastructure. Now that we have a better understanding of Cisco One, we can say that this is similar to the Cisco One Enterprise Cloud Suite. That means it contains so many other features as well. In this recording, I will show you about the Cisco Prime service catalogue and different components inside the Prime catalog. But in general, if you see the overall overview of, say, the Cisco Prime Service Catalog, you will find that, okay, you are there in your traditional network. Your goal is to integrate with the cloud infrastructure structure.
Now, this particular thing is theinside picture of the cloud infrastructure. This is cloud infrastructure. Okay? Now, we have three main parameters here. What are those three main parameters? So we have something called the Cloud Portal. and this is that. I’m mentioning that Cisco Prime service catalog. CPSE. I’ll demonstrate: I’ll log in and show you what you’ll find inside this cloud portal. So an end user, first of all, will log in to the portal. That is the service catalogue portal. And from there, it can integrate with UCS Director. Say, this is Cloud Orchestrator. One example is UCS Director, and then you can measure the service. So, when I cover UCS Director at that time, I’ll show you that we also have a cloud metre inside usagedirector. Okay? So from here, you can reach Cloud Orchestrator, and then you can provision different types of services. Say, services like network services, storage services, virtualization services, and integration with VM Manager. So you’ll get a variety of services from your service catalogue and the UCS director.
So you can think of this as a cloud software stack. From the cloud software stack, you can interact with various IT infrastructures. Or here we have cloud infrastructure with respect to, say, network, storage, virtualization, and VMware or VM Manager. Okay? Now, if you log in to the Cisco Prime Services catalog, it will look like this: So let me log in to this and show you some of the features. I logged inside. And you can see that you have, say, first of all, this welcome message that welcomes you to your It as a Service storefront. The Cisco Prime Service Catalog is the ITAs catalog, providing self-service for private and hybrid clouds. So it is very important that we have self-service for private and hybrid clouds. Okay? And it can provide out-of-box integration for UCS directors as well. Correct? If I scroll down here, you’ll see that I can integrate this cloud with Enterprise IT services like Epic, which offer private cloud infrastructure as a service. Then I can integrate with cloud computing services like Cloud Center, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure service.Then inside Cloud Services, you can see these are the operating systems.
These are the applications. Inside private cloud infrastructure, you can see services deployed via the UCS directory. Cisco’s prime service catalogue is “IT-as-a-Service”—all those definitions. Then finally, inside the ACI, we can create T 19 ACI. We can create a three-tier profile. We can deploy new equipment, such as ACI, to new equipment. Suppose if I click here and here, you can see that it’s very similar and that you are purchasing something from Amazon. Correct. So what do you want? order for others? Order. Suppose if I click “order,” then I will get a new page. This new page will inquire about deploying ACI to new equipment. Yes, I want to submit it. So this is the way, basically: you can simply go to the catalog, and whatever you want to deploy, you can deploy it. Okay? So I hope this particular section will be very informative for you and that you’ll learn new things from this video.
89. Cloud Orchestrator
I hope you understand the service catalog. The next topic is cloud orchestration. Now, this cloud orchestrator can do so many things, and first of all, I will list all the applications, then I will log in to UCS Director, which is one of the cloud orchestrators from Cisco, and then we’ll match up all the things that we are going to discuss here. Okay? So let me highlight all these things one by one. That is what my UCS director is capable of. Okay? So first of all, as you can see here in the slide, it can manage and support heterogeneous data centers. OK? So it can support a variety of datacenters, including compute, network storage, and virtualization resources from multiple vendors, as shown here. So irrespective of Cisco, they can support NetApp, VMware, EMC, and other vendors they can support; we’ll see that. Okay, that is one of the features of a heterogeneous data center.
So let me mark only this portion; you can note it down as well. Heterogeneous data centre plus multiple vendors Second, it can provision physical and virtual compute layers for four to seven network services and storage resources. So again, the second point is also very important: that it can not only provision physical but virtual resources, that is, compute as well. That is the second point. So the first, second, and third points are to create and implement single and multi-tier application profiles. So it can create an application profile, which is the third. So if we highlight it, it can support heterogeneous data centers. Let me circle it with “multiple vendor support.” It has two compute application profiles: physical and virtual. Fourth, define an application container, which is a collection of tiers that include physical or virtual compute resources and follow connectivity and communication policies. You can further define those application containers.
So it can define an application container. Okay, so now we have four important points: heterogeneous data center, multiple vendors, provision of physical and virtual compute, creation and implementation of single and multitenant application profiles, definition of application containers—all these things I will show you while logging in to use this director. Then establish a multi-tier environment. You can see here that users, whether internal to your company or external, can work only within the secure constraints of their own resource pool. Okay? So it can establish a secure multi-tenant environment. Point number five: implement metering. So this metering is actually how you can measure the services or the resources. That is the third pillar. Remember, we have three things inside our cloud stack. So one was the service catalog, the second was the orchestrator, and the third was metering how you are charging. Okay, so inside this UCS directory, we have both the option.Not only can it perform orchestration, but it can also perform metering and, most importantly, automation. So it can do the automation with its resources and implement a process-oriented approach. Okay, so it can do the automation feature as well. Let me log into UCS Director and show you all these things inside UCS Director, and let me highlight all these things. So here you can see, first of all, inside the dashboard. So what are the things we can see? So, active versus inactive VMs UCS serverinventory UCS server-associated versus unassociated So we have a dashboard e can see?
Then I can go and click to converge. So if I go inside Converge, you will see the multi-vendor support of UCS Director. So not only is it supporting VMware virtualization, but you can see a shared VMware virtual center. It is supporting a Cisco computer, and it is supporting a Cisco network, which is the VSM. Again, this is something like a virtual supervisor module, or we can define it. You can see the Nexus kilobyte VSM virtual supervisor module by clicking here. And we know two things: the virtual supervisor module and the Ethernet module, so VIM and VSM. In any case, it also supports NetApp storage. So here you can see that storage from NetApp is behind all these things we have here inside this converge; if I go and check Hyperconverge, it has HyperFlex and the virtual sand feature. Then, here at the top, you can see that it supports virtual and physical resources as well. So, what are the contents of virtual? It is supporting a virtual compute and storage network.
It serves as a physical compute and storage network. So it’s a compute storage network in terms of the virtual and physical resources it supports, followed by service catalogue approvals summary, virtual resource, physical resource chargeback within the organization. These chargebacks are actually very important. This is similar to metering in some ways. That is the third feature inside the cloud stack. Then, finally, it can create policies. So you can see that it can create the application container that we have seen in the PPT and then create a virtual hypervisor policy. Not only can it create containers, but it can also create policies for virtual service delivery, computer storage networks, and physical infrastructure policies such as usage manager, central NetAppother thing, okay, and finally, you can administer this particular software-based machine. So you have a licence system, LDAP integration, and other stuff. This cloud sense and the chargeback are examples of metering. So this cloud is here, and we have seen the chargeback as well. Okay, so this is the overall summary of our UCS director, and I hope you understand the dashboard and the basic features inside this particular UCS character.
90. Cloud Meter
In our cloud software stack, we have Cloud Meter. What is the use of a cloud meter? The use case of the Cloud Meter that we can see here is that it focuses on service management or measurement in a cloud computing deployment. Simply say we have three components. One is the service catalog, one is the orchestrator, and one is the cloud meter. Because of the use of CloudMeter, whenever the orchestrator releases a new version, So, whenever we receive a deployment request to deploy something, say in terms of physical or virtual resources, cloud metre receives a notification from the cloud orchestrator informing when infrastructure resources are provisioned for the cloud consumer. So it will receive the notification that a particular consumer has done something. Obviously, it will receive the notification from the orchestrator.
That is the first goal. The second thing is that it supports the creation of a billing plan. The third, summarise and receive information, eliminates errors such as duplicate data or some other parameters, such as generating on-demand reports per user group business. So you can summarise like this, just for sake of simplicity: it is one component inside the cloud stack that is used to receive the notification. one, which is supporting the creation of a billing plan. Two, summarising the received information implies that data will be duplicated, i.e., what is the actual bill for a specific consumer or customer? And then it finally provides on-demand reporting to the cloud portal.
Okay, so these are the uses of the cloud meter, and in short, it is doing the measurement or measuring of various applications or resources inside the cloud suit. What are the functions, or what type of application or modules do we have inside the UCS Director to support this? Inside. The Chargeback module and the Cloud Sense tab are available in UCS Director. We have seen in the last section what it looks like. If you go inside, say usage. Director. And if you check this Cloud Sense, and then click on the Cloud Sense, you will be presented with a list of billing plans. So here you can see that the application container report, billing report for the consumer, inventory report, utilisation report, and netapp report are all sorts of reports we have with the help of this particular Cloud Sense. And again, we have this chargeback module, which enables detailed visibility into the cost structure of the orchestrated cloud infrastructure. Okay, so I’m doing the summary here. This cloud metre will only charge you back. Charge it back and with the assistance of, say, the cloud, because it will measure the services, summarise the bill, and receive notifications. Okay? So, at this point, I’m hoping you understand this specific metering service, CloudMetering, and you’ll guess.
91. Cloud Journey , Consolidation , Virtualization , Standardization & Automation
when we are talking about the cloud journey. A cloud journey means that you are moving your legacy IT infrastructure to the cloud. Now, to move from legacy infrastructure to the cloud, you have five parameters, or you have five stoppages, as you can say. So first of all, it will start with consolidation, then it will move to virtualization, then it will go to standardization, and then it will go to automation. And finally, we have the orchestration. Okay? So one by one, I’m going to COVID all these five parameters. In this particular recording, we’ll discuss consolidation, virtualization, standardization, and automation. Let us start with consolidation. In this particular diagram, you can see that all of the clients, client ABC, have their own storage, server, and data center. Customers A and B have data centres A and B, respectively, and customers C and C have data centres C.
Okay, but suppose we move all these infrastructure structures into the consolidated state. So at that time, you can see that not only do you have redundancy from the servers to the storage area network or toward the storage, but you can also share the resources. So that is the overall goal of consolidation: to share the resources. So the first step toward cloud integration or cloud migration is to consolidate resources to properly share them. Okay? Now the second thing is virtualization. And it’s a huge concept: virtualization. One of the main players in virtualization is VMware. But now other companies are also doing virtualization. If we see the evolution of virtualization, virtualization is not a new concept.
This virtualization is bit old because if we see, say, VLAN, VLAN is a type of virtualization inside Cisco, say, inside Cisco Nexus switch, we have concept of VDC virtual device content or context that is also a type of virtualization. If we are thinking about, say, an AC firewall inside a firewall as well, context means you can create a virtual AC firewall inside the firewall. So the concept of virtualization is not, say, new; it’s an old concept. However, as a result of this, VMware has done tremendous work within virtualization. Initially, they start with server virtualization, then they move into other products as well. Then they move on to, say, data center virtualization; their product is NSX; then they move on to SD-WAN virtualization, say for wide area networks; and they acquire some companies. So again, this virtualization is a huge thing. Not only do we have virtualization in terms of network, we have virtualization in terms of storage, and we have virtualization in terms of server as well. Okay? As a result, you can think of this as a second step toward the cloud. And the third step is standardization. Standardization is important because you need some sort of standard model and some sort of standard parameter upon which you will define the sources, the compute, and the storage. Okay? So standardization will provide the uniformity inside the infrastructure.
So in terms of vendor, model, version, storage, server, network, everything Okay, so this is also very important: We are moving our legacy IT infrastructure to the cloud, or we are doing the cloud integration. Finally, we have automation. This automation is also in use nowadays. Perhaps you’ve heard that in the last two to three years, everyone has been learning Python, such as Ansible Pearl. These are the languages that network engineers use; initially, say five or six years ago, Network engineers are not worried or bothered about the programming languages. Network engineers are now beginning to learn Python or another programming language or scripting language.
Why? We use that use case to migrate traditional infrastructure to the cloud because it is one of the automation use cases. And that is one of the major milestones for a legacy IT infrastructure. Now, if we use the automation, what types of benefits will we get? We’ll gain the advantage of being able to eliminate any human errors that exist. That is the first thing. Second, whatever manual operations we used to perform, we can now automate. With that script, it will do all the manual work that we used to do within, say, a fraction of a second or maybe minutes. Okay? So these are two things that, with the help of automation, give us the concept of reusability. We can write code, we can write templates, and we can occasionally execute them without human error.
Okay? So we can remove the manual procedure. Then auto-mission invariably transforms through provisioning, migration, and decommissioning. Isn’t there a plethora of good scripts? So, suppose you run those scripts and it automatically configures everything, okay? And then finally, you can see that, much like a modern industrial procedure line, the operational terms of an automated data centre must design tasks that can be carried out. Software robots closely monitor their That means, in short, that you can write procedural codes or a script to reduce the manual workload. And you can achieve the highest level of accuracy with the help of automation. Okay, so let us stop here.
92. Orchestration, Application Programming Interfaces , RESTful APIs
In this session, I’m going to explain what an orchestration application programming interface is. That is the restful API. , in the world, in the world, and the world, in the world, in the world, and the world in the world. And one of the things we’ve seen with UCS Director is what we can do with its assistance. So, in summary, we can do the consolidation. In summary, we can do the virtualization, we can achieve the target of standardization, and we can perform the automation. So all these things we can do with an orchestrator Okay? Now the next topic is the application programming interface. Now it is coming: how we can configure a device. So, device configuration is something we can do with CLI on whatever Cisco iOS devices we use to do the configuration, such as Cisco routers and switches.
There’s no problem with that. CLI can also be used to configure the majority of virtual devices or virtual device managers. Okay? Then we have the SDK (software development kit). That is a collection of tools, including code, documents, and examples; it’s a complete package. SDK is similar to a kit. It’s a complete package. And we know about this. That okay. The SDK for Java, the Java programming language, is on the way. Now we have Python as well, because Python is one of the languages mostly used within the network infrastructure. It’s a lightweight type of language. It’s an interpreter-type of language. It means you can run it anywhere on any platform. It’s something like that. It’s very lightweight. To run Python, we don’t need many databases, libraries, or binaries. Simply put, we can execute this Python program. Most Cisco devices support this Python programming.
Okay? So that’s why the use case for Python is really high. Then finally, we have an application programming interface. Again, an application programming interface is a set of function variables and data structures that we can execute over a manager. With help from that manager, we can write those APIs inside that particular fabric. So, what does it mean? I have one use case here, which I will show you in this particular session. What does it mean by “API”? And what does Rest API mean when we’re integrating with the Restful API or Rest API? Rest API, full form That representational state transfer is visible. And what happens when we add API? So, I have an example case here. I’m going to show you this example case with the help of our network management system. So, what exactly is this network management system that we oversee? Example VI pela is a Cisco SDWAN that I used. And if you know a little bit about SDWAN, SDWAN is nothing and SDN is nothing but the decoupling of the control and data planes.
You can also decouple from the management and orchestrator planes. But in a loose sense, it’s a decoupling of the control and data planes. So your control plane will be hosted somewhere, and your data plane will be hosted somewhere. Data plane responsibilities are just to forward the data traffic and control plane, from where you can set the policies, route securities, and all sorts of parameters, okay? Now, to send the instruction from the control plane to the data plane, you can do various things. So you can use CLI (there is no restriction) or API, for example. Assume I’m using the Restful API in this example. So you can see here that I have this option of doing a Restful API. Either I can use V Manage, which is one sort of management for what we can say is the software inside SDWAN. VI pela Yeah, it’s software. So you’ve vanished here.
Say it’s VH smart; it’s VH. These are the terms inside SDWAN. Cisco SDWAN. Anyway, we’re not going to get into what these terms mean, but we’re just making sure I have a control plane and a data plane. And with the help of the control plane, I can send instructions using this data plane. That is the overall goal here. And, practically, we can do anything with the help of API calls. So, what options do we have here? We can do certificate management, we can do configuration, we can have device and device inventory, we can do monitoring, real-time monitoring, and troubleshooting—all sorts of things we can do with the help of the Restful API. And how are we going to do it? Obviously, we have these Rest APIs, and they have some methods.
They have some procedures. So what procedures do they have? So inside Http, or wherever Http is, they can use Get, put post delete “Get” means to retrieve or read information. “Put” means to update an object. “Post” means to create an object. Delete means to remove an object. Okay, so these are the functions inside the Http or Https method. We can achieve our goal with their assistance. Okay? In addition, for practical purposes, We can check Cisco, SDWAN, and Vitelli. That is one example. The other example is, say, ACI Infrastructure, where we have an Epic Controller. So, for example, we can configure Epic Controller using RestfulAPI. And from that epic management plane, we can configure the rest of Leaf and spy inside the land infrastructure.
