New and Changed Information
The following table provides an overview of the significant changes to this guide for this current release. The table does not provide an exhaustive list of all changes made to the guide or of the new features in this release.
The following tables provide information about the new and changed features in Cisco NDFC.
Product Impact | Features | Description | Where documented |
---|---|---|---|
Ease of Use | Disable Promiscuous mode for virtual Nexus Dashboard (vND) deployments | From Release 12.1.2e, you can disable promiscuous mode on port groups associated with the vND management and data interface vNICs. All features that use persistent IP will continue to work even for Layer-2 adjacent vND deployments. | |
Elasticsearch to Open Search database | From Release 12.1.2e, NDFC uses an OpenSearch database for storing time series data. As part of the upgrade process from prior NDFC releases, data is seamlessly migrated from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch. |
NA |
|
Inline Backup Restore | This feature enables you to perform a config-only restore on an existing NDFC system using a prior backup. The backup itself may be a full backup or a config-only backup. In prior releases, a restore from a backup file, could only be performed on a freshly installed NDFC, with no persona enabled. Now you can also restore the backup on an In-Service system where some persona has already been enabled. | ||
Interoperability | NDFC with Nexus Dashboard QCOW2 deployments on KVM hypervisor on RHEL Release 8.6 | NDFC can be installed on a virtual Nexus Dashboard cluster running on top of KVM hypervisor running on top of CentOS and RHEL operating systems. All 3 personas namely, Fabric Controller, Fabric Discovery, and SAN Controller are supported. | |
Performance and Scalability | Resource Utilization for MinIO and CockroachDB | NDFC Release 12.1.2e uses CockroachDB which is a distributed SQL database primarily for configuration data. It uses MinIO as an object store for storing blob files like switch images, patches, and so on. Both CockroachDB and MinIO export statistics that are collected and made available on Nexus Dashboard Web UI > Infrastructure > Resource Utilization, dashboards namely, CockroachDB and Minio Overview. |
NA |
Licensing | NDFC Licensing for 3rd Party Devices | NDFC licenses for 3rd party devices will be supported in the DCN 3rd Party Essentials License tier. Customers can now purchase the DCN 3rd Party Essentials for Arista devices onboarded into NDFC. |
Product Impact | Feature | Description | Where documented |
---|---|---|---|
Interoperability | Support for NDFC with Nexus Dashboard on RHEL 8.6 | From Release 12.1.2e, NDFC is supported with Nexus Dashboard deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.6 version. NDFC SAN Controller is supported with without SAN Insights. | |
Performance and Scalability | Enhancements to SAN Insights |
|
|
Ease of Use | Enhancements to Zoning |
|
|
Ease of Use | FC Name Server | Name Server stores name entries for all hosts in the FCNS database. The Name Server tab displays name server entries for the selected Fabric. Note that this data is pulled from the Switches discovery, and therefore, the duplicate entries are removed. | |
Ease of Use | DIRL Congestion management enhancements |
|
|
Ease of Use | Host and Storage Dashboard display discovery source information | On the Host and Storage Dashboards, a new icon is introduced next to the host name and storage name that displays the type of discovery. It displays if the enclosure is from a VMware vCenter or storage or FC discovery. | |
Ease of Use | Configuration Drift | A new monitoring job is executed daily to check for differences in baseline configuration and current configuration. Configuration Drift feature displays Yes when there is a difference between baseline and current configuration and an appropriate alarm is raised. | |
Ease of Use | UCS discovery | From Release 12.1.2e, NDFC allows you to discover switches using UCS credentials. |