Open NX-OS provides foundational elements for the automation and configuration life cycle management of a network device. This is essential to initial bootstrapping and provisioning of the NX-OS device. Ongoing life cycle management of device configurations can be accomplished using configuration management agents, programming and open source tools.
The network build and operation lifecycle is divided in three main phases or stages:
- Day-0 – Initial device and network startup
- Day-1 – Incremental configuration, including provisioning of new end-points and workloads
- Day-2 – Monitoring and Visibility
Starting at Day-0 (zero), the network device is brought up with an initial configuration. In general, the network device could be provisioned with all relevant configuration at Day-0, but the focus for initial startup should be on features and functions which change the least over the lifecycle of the network element. Device name, management IP address, and routing process configuration are some examples.
While Host interface and Port-Channel configuration could be part of the Day-0 configuration, most likely not all information will be available at initial network device setup. Configuration of these elements can be automated in later phases.
Day-1 provisioning covers incremental and ongoing configuration changes. During this phase, flexible configuration management and automation allows changes to be accomplished in an efficient way. Management of end-points and segmentation are examples.
The division between Day-0 and Day-1 configuration can be very fluid as the initial configuration can span from simple management access to an extensive configuration to enable a network device to participate in a data center network fabric.
Sample Minimal Switch Configuration (Day-0)
- Switch name
- Admin username and password
- Out-of-Band management interface and routing
- Console access
Extended Switch Configuration (Day-0)
- Inband management
- AAA - Authentication, Authorization and Accounting
- Enabling NX-OS features
- Global switching parameters
- Common routing protocol parameters
- vPC - Virtual Port-Channel domain
- VXLAN VTEP parameters
- Network interfaces
Day-0 or Day-1 configuration
- Access/host interfaces configurations including vPCs
- Tenant/workload configs: VRFs, routes, host facing VLANs
- Additional features
At Day-2, visibility and monitoring become extremely important. In most environments, Day-1 and Day-2 operations run in parallel and extend through the entire lifecycle of the network device, and appropriate tooling is necessary to achieve these tasks efficiently.