CML 2.2 Release Notes

Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) is a network simulation platform. CML 2.2 is the latest feature release of CML, and these release notes include information for all CML 2.2.x maintenance releases.

New and Changed Information

This table shows any published changes to this CML 2.2 release notes document.

Installing or Upgrading to CML 2.2

The CML Installation Guide provides detailed steps for installing or upgrading to CML 2.2.x.

If you already have an earlier CML 2.x instance, you can upgrade it to CML 2.2. You may upgrade directly to CML 2.2 from any CML 2.0.x or CML 2.1.x release. See the In-Place Upgrade page for step-by-step upgrade instructions. Upgrades from CML 1.x are not supported.

If you choose to migrate an existing, licensed CML 2.x instance to a new installation of CML 2.2, you must deregister the old CML instance before decommissioning it. See the note at the end of the Licensing - Deregistration page for instructions on deregistering a CML installation.

If you are creating a new CML instance, first choose one of these two CML installation options:

• Deploy as a virtual machine (VM) on a supported VMware hypervisor
• Deploy as a bare metal server

Check the System Requirements for supported hypervisors and other system requirements. Download the installation files, and then follow the installation and initial set-up instructions for your selected installation option.

Summary of Changes

CML 2.2.1 was a feature release of CML. This section explains the features that were added or changed since CML 2.1.2.

Link Labels

Link labels are now available in the workbench. The labels are automatically generated based on the interface name. The labels can be toggled on/off via the workbench toolbar. See the CML User Guide - Workbench.

Note: Link labels are not shown for the external connector and unmanaged switch node types. Link labels are also hidden when there are two or more links added between two nodes.

Link Styles

The link style can now be changed from the default curved links to straight links via the workbench toolbar. See CML User Guide - Workbench

Console Pane in the UI

This release includes changes to the console in the UI.

• By default, when you connect to a node's console, the Console pane will now display up to 300 lines of history from the activity on that node's console before you connected to it.
• The Console spans the entire width of the lower pane of the Workbench.
• The settings, such as the number of rows and columns for the console or the number of lines of history to display, are now configured via a separate console settings dialog.
• You may also enable auto-connect in the console settings dialog. With that setting enabled, the UI will auto-connect to a node's console as soon as you open the Console pane or select a different node in the Workbench while the Console is visible. Note that even with auto-connect enabled, you may need to click in the Console to change the focus to that pane of the UI before you can type in the console.
• As long as you are using the same web browser, the console settings will apply to all consoles for all labs even if you log out and log back into the UI.

Other Notable UI Changes

• The Show All button on the Dashboard is now available in both list and tiles mode and for all users. Toggle this button to change the lab list from showing only your labs vs. all labs you can access. See Changing the Lab List View and Multi-Selecting Labs and Lab Sharing.
• As long as you are using the same web browser, the current state of the Show All and Show List toggle buttons will be preserved when you return to the Dashboard page, even after you log out and log back into CML.
• Download System Archive has been disabled. This feature was never fully supported, and it will be added back in a future release.
• The Force Wipe button for a node has been removed from the Workbench page of the UI. Note: It is still possible to force-wipe a node via the CML APIs.
• The System Administration page has been updated to use a tabbed layout.
• The web browser's window or tab title now shows the current page name. In previous releases, the window or tab title was the same for all pages.
• When you edit a lab's title in the Dashboard or in the lab Workbench, the input field has confirm (✔) and cancel (✖) buttons.
• Since CML 2.2.2, the VNC pane for a node has new buttons for showing the VNC in full screen and for sending the CTRL+ALT+DEL keyboard sequence to the node.

Lab Sharing

CML 2.2 introduces the ability to share labs with other users on the same CML instance. You can grant other users read-only or read/write access to the lab. This lab permissions feature is available for all non-personal license levels, such as CML-Enterprise.

For details on this feature, see the CML User Guide - Lab Sharing.

Base OS and Security Improvements

The base operating system (OS) for new CML installations has been updated to CentOS 8.3.2011 for both OVA and bare metal deployments.

CML 2.2 has an improved security posture. For example, the SSH and TLS configurations have been updated to prevent vulnerable ciphers from being used. The CML UI has been updated to prevent potential XSS vulnerabilities. To improve password strength, new or updated CML user passwords will be checked against a list of thousands of common, easy-to-guess passwords.

CML 2.1.x was restricted to running an older version of the Linux kernel to avoid problems with specific reference platforms. CML 2.2.1 relaxes the list of packages that are excluded from updates, enabling your CML server to use the latest kernel from the upstream Linux repositories. The CML Smart Licensing module has also been updated, making it compatible with the current base system libraries. These changes make it safer to for administrators to apply CentOS security updates to a CML server.

Node Definition Improvements

The default Server image that is provided on the new refplat ISO file includes IPv6 support.

CML's boot monitor can now use regular expressions. When creating a custom node definition, you may use regular expressions in the boot lines that you add to the node definition's Boot section. See the CML User Guide - Creating A New Node Definition.

The node definition editor has a new Video Model dropdown for selecting the video driver. Select Tools > Node and Image Definitions from the navigation menu. In a node definition, the Video Model dropdown is part of the Linux Native Simulation group.

Updates for Admin Users

With administrator privileges, you can modify the role of an existing user. Select Tools > System Administration from the navigation menu, and click on the User Administration tab.

You may now search for users in the User Administration page. Select Tools > System Administration from the navigation menu, and click on the User Administration tab. Enter text in the Search box to filter the list of users.

When you delete a user, a confirmation dialog will be shown before the user is removed.

When downloading logs in the CML2 page in Cockpit, you may now select the number of days of log data to include.

The Cockpit CML2 page now includes exposes additional actions:

• There's a new Licensing Reset button under the Factory Reset group. Normally, you would configure licensing on the Tools > Licensing page in the CML UI, but in some licensing failure cases, it is necessary to reset all licensing data before relicensing the instance.
• The new Copy Refplat ISO button replaces the old script for copying the reference platforms to the CML server's hard drive. See Copy the Refplat ISO to Disk for more details.
• The new Remove Orphaned VMs button in Cockpit permits you to remove old VMs that CML is no longer using. It is normal for the Force Wipe action to leave these orphaned files or VMs on the CML server, but they will continue to consume disk space on your CML server. The Remove Orphaned VMs button enables the sysadmin account to clean up the system.

API Changes

CML 2.2.1 introduces several changes to the REST-based web service APIs. For details about a specific API, log into the CML UI and click Tools > API Documentation to view the CML API documentation page.

New APIs in CML 2.2

This table lists the API endpoints that were added in CML 2.2.1.

APIs Changed in CML 2.2

This table lists existing API endpoints that were modified in CML 2.2.1:

Bug Fixes

A list of the significant bugs fixed in CML 2.2.

Known Issues and Caveats for CML 2.2

sudo sed -i 's/^mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/; s/^#baseurl/baseurl/; s/mirror.centos.org/vault.centos.org/' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-AppStream.repo 
sudo sed -i 's/^mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/; s/^#baseurl/baseurl/; s/mirror.centos.org/vault.centos.org/' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-BaseOS.repo 
sudo sed -i 's/^mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/; s/^#baseurl/baseurl/; s/mirror.centos.org/vault.centos.org/' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-Extras.repo

sudo rm /etc/cockpit/ws-certs.d/0-self-signed.cert 
sudo systemctl restart cockpit

nmcli con

check con del bridge0-p1 
nmcli con add type bridge-slave \
    con-name bridge0-p1 \
    ifname enp9s0 master bridge0 
nmcli con down enp10s0 
# verify that the set up is now correct 
nmcli con

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --change-zone=virbr0 --zone=libvirt 
sudo systemctl reload firewalld

sudo sed -i 's/ahvz/ahvzX/' 
/usr/share/cockpit/virl2/copy-refplat-iso-to-disk.sh

sudo systemctl stop virl2.target 
source /etc/default/virl2 
sudo semanage fcontext -a -t virt_content_t "$REF_PLAT_ISO_IMAGE(/.)?" 
sudo restorecon -vvRF "$REF_PLAT_ISO_IMAGE" 
sudo semanage fcontext -a -t virt_content_t "$REF_PLAT/diff(/.)?" 
sudo restorecon -vvRF "$REF_PLAT/diff" 
sudo systemctl start virl2.target

sudo -E -s 
echo "CML_Personal" > /var/local/virl2/smart/product.txt 
chmod 644 /var/local/virl2/smart/product.txt 
chown nginx:nginx /var/local/virl2/smart/product.txt