New Networking Capabilities on Cisco Intersight

Bringing simplicity to complex hybrid cloud operations is the fundamental goal of Cisco Intersight. With a SaaS form factor, which alleviates the burden of installation and ongoing maintenance, Intersight provides comprehensive visibility, consistent day-to-day operations, and automated orchestration to ensure infrastructure is secure and compliant across all hybrid assets. In addition to the cloud SaaS option, we also provide a Connected Virtual Appliance (CVA) or a fully air-gapped Private Virtual Appliance (PVA) options to run on-premises.

To start, Cisco Intersight focused on the management and operations of compute, storage, and virtualization domains from a single cohesive user interface. The compute domain includes Cisco UCS servers and 3rd party servers, the storage domain includes Cisco HyperFlex, NetApp, Pure Storage, and Hitachi, and the virtualization domain spans VMware ESXi, and Amazon Web Services. We are very happy to extend Intersight’s management capabilities to the network domain. Cisco Nexus 9000 series data center switch support is now made generally available in Intersight platform.

What’s new?

Here are few things you can start doing at the get-go with these newly introduced capabilities:

Network visibility and operations: Like servers and storage arrays you can view and monitor your ethernet switches from the Intersight unified user interface and benefit from up-to-date network inventory knowledge. L2 neighbors view extends this infrastructure view beyond the switch itself to the identities of devices connected to the respective switch.
Cross-domain orchestration: You can construct end-to-end workflows for routine cross-domain orchestration functions such as provisioning a server in a particular VLAN and enabling respective switch ports, or consistently deploy private cloud infrastructure configuration to servers, switches, and storage arrays. Think NTP/DNS/Syslog/SNMP servers and MTUs across the network.
Management of Converged Infrastructure (CI) systems: Network domain capabilities facilitate creation comprehensive inventory for CI systems, such as FlexPod and elevate them as first-class citizens in the Intersight platform. Programmatic management of routine operations for these systems can be supported.

Cisco Intersight ethernet switch grid view

Intersight Cisco Nexus switch summary — Cisco Intersight switch summary view

How it works?

Now you can onboard Cisco Nexus 9000 datacenter switches in NX-OS mode on Intersight. After claiming any Nexus 9K switches, Intersight presents rich inventory views including a summary, variety of switch hardware sub-systems, and switch configuration for that device.

Automate your network with the rest of the datacenter

Intersight Cloud Orchestrator (ICO) provides end-to-end orchestration and automated operations across the many infrastructure domains managed by Intersight. With Intersight workflow designer, you can construct cross-domain workflows in a no/low code environment using a curated Task Library of turnkey platform-integrated tasks and actions.

Intersight Task Library is inducted with a rich set of everyday switch management tasks for the Nexus 9000 datacenter switching family in NX-OS mode. These native tasks are backed by comprehensive inventory views, which deliver no-code experience for constructing and executing the cross-domain orchestration workflows. The task categories include basic system management tasks, comprehensive switch port management, and VLAN management. The granularity of these automation tasks is extended all the way to Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) operations levels for the supported switch management objects. This allows you to construct automation workflows very closely aligned with your deployment.

Interisght switch port inventory view — Cisco Intersight switch port inventory view

Intersight witch L2 neighbor inventory view — Cisco Interisght switch L2 neighbor inventory view

Stay in control

You can effectively define and enforce your organization’s Role Based Access Control (RBAC) policies using Intersight Roles and Privilege Sets. Intersight has introduced two new Privilege Sets for Network Domain: Network Administrator and Network Operator. These Privilege Sets can be used to define appropriate Roles in the organization for governing the access to management functions of the network assets in Intersight. For example, a user with Network Administrator Privilege Set can only define and execute workflows using Network Task.

Getting Connected with Intersight

If you want to try it for yourself, you can create a free account on www.intersight.com and request a free trial of any Intersight capability, including orchestration. Feel free to onboard your Nexus 9000 switches and monitor those along with the compute and storage resources from a unified UI. End-to-end orchestration workflows supported by Nexus native task library, such as provisioning a server in a VLAN and turn-up respective switch ports, will help you reduce your Hybrid Cloud OpEx, deliver time-to-service acceleration, and reduce operational risks for everyday datacenter management operations.