Category Archives: Virtualization

CSR 1000v First Impressions

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At Cisco Live London I attended a very interesting session about the Cisco Cloud Services Router by Anurag Gurtu (BRKVIR-2016 – Cisco’s Cloud Services Router (CSR 1000v): Extending the Enterprise Network to the Cloud).

The CSR 1000v, which was announced last summer at Cisco Live San Diego, is a router in a VM form-factor, based on the Cisco ASR 1000 platform. It runs a modified version of the same IOS XE software that also runs on the physical ASR routers and has a very similar feature set. Ultimately, it will allow enterprises to run their workloads in a cloud infrastructure and then connect those VMs to their own network based on familiar WAN technologies, using the same CLI that they also use on their physical Cisco routers. In addition, the CSR will support a number of APIs to allow automated provisioning of CSR instances in a cloud infrastructure.

During the Data Center Security Techtorial that I attended on Monday, I had already had a sneak preview of the software running in VMware on the presenter’s laptop. Since the CSR has not officially been released yet, this was a beta version, but as far as I could see it was fully functional. Anurag also had a couple of screenshots of the software in his presentation and he was kind enough to offer the session attendees access to the software if they wanted to evaluate it by themselves. Of course, I jumped on this opportunity. Continue reading →

Cisco Nexus 1000v ISSU

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Now that Cisco has finally released the software for the Cisco ASA 1000v virtual security appliance, I am eager to install it and get a feel for its capabilities. However, before I can get to the fun part and start playing with the virtual ASA, I will have to upgrade the virtual infrastructure in my lab to the correct versions to support it. Primarily, this means that I will have to upgrade both the Nexus 1000v and the VNMC that I have running in my lab.

In a lab situation, the simplest way to accomplish this would be to just deploy a completely new instance of the Nexus 1000v and then restore its configuration from a backup, but I decided that it would be more educational to actually perform an upgrade from my current Nexus 1000v version 4.2(1)SV1(5.1a) to the version 4.2(1)SV1(5.2) that is required to support the ASA 1000v. According to the Cisco documentation it should be possible to perform this procedure as a hitless In-Service Software Update (ISSU), so I decide to put that to the test and see if there are any gotchas in this process.

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