Cisco DCNM Rocks

I am not sure why I waited so long to check out DCNM but I wish I hadn’t because DNCM Rocks!!

For those of you that don’t know DCNM is management software for monitoring, configuring and troubleshooting the following Cisco Nexus and MDS switches.

 

• Nexus 7000 Series
• Nexus 5000 Series
• Nexus 3000 Series
• Nexus 2000 Series
• Nexus 1000v
• Catalyst 6500s
• MDS 9500 Series
• MDS 9200 Series
• MDS 9100 Series

DCNM Features:

• LAN/SAN Performance monitoring
• LAN/SAN Configuration
• VMpath – VMware Virtual Machine aware path management
• Performance trending and forecasting
• Troubleshooting assistance
• Event Management
• Reporting
• Client/Server deployment model

There are 3 licensing options for DCNM and a free essentials license.

• DCNM SAN only
• DCNM LAN only
• DCNM Converged LAN and SAN

Here are 2 tables detailing the features you get with essentials and advanced:

• DCNM LAN – http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/sw/6_x/dcnm/installation/published/licensing_DCNM.html#wp1604041
• DCNM SAN – http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/sw/6_x/dcnm/installation/published/licensing_DCNM.html#wp1603679

If you are familiar with Fabric Manager then you already know most of DCNM SAN because it is the same software just rebranded to DCNM.

So far my favorite part of DCNM is the web interface. From here you can drill down into an ESXi host and get:

• CPU/Memory usage
• Network I/O
• Disk Latency
• VMs to storage path

To get this data you have to add your vCenter as a data source into DCNM. Here is a screen shot, click on it to see the full picture in a new window.

Storage view detailing host to storage connectivity.

Another cool feature is the reporting, here is an example report

There are 2 java clients that can be used for configuration of LAN and SAN. The DCNM LAN client is for Nexus LAN configuration and DCNM SAN for MDS/Nexus FC configuration.

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