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Cisco Crosswork Network Controller 2.0 with Data Gateway 2.0 Installation Lab v2

May 2021

Cisco Crosswork Network Automation is a micro-services platform that brings together streaming telemetry, big data, and model-driven application programming interfaces (APIs). This lab will show you how to install the Crosswork 4.0 Infrastructure, a set of applications, and the Data Gateway. The user will interact with VMware VCenter and docker on Ubuntu for the install process. A short overview of the components follows:

  • Crosswork Infrastructure installs as a set of 3 VMs, then configured as a cluster for High Availability.
  • Data Gateway gathers all the information from the monitored devices and forwards it to Crosswork for analysis and processing. Crosswork can also be used to send collected data to an external customer-managed messaging bus, such as Kafka or gRPC servers. The Data Gateway offloads voluminous data collection closer to the devices while allowing target applications to scale independently. It installs as one or more VMs and can be used for Crosswork cloud applications, or for on-premise. It can also be installed in an extended version, as we will be doing in this lab. This allows for KPI scalability with distributed processing.
  • Active Topology is the viewer and deployer for Crosswork Network Controller. It will visualize services that are being deployed, and show how they interact with each other and the network.
  • Optimization Engine is responsible for control and optimization of Segment Routing paths, link optimization, and bandwidth control. It also handles RSVP based TE tunnels.
  • Health Insights will help the user keep track of network and device health by monitoring telemetry KPIs across SNMP, MDT, and gNMI.
  • Change Automation is an application that automates the process of deploying changes to the network. There are different play types and users can create their own verbs and plays.
  • Zero Touch Provisioning is an application that can assist with bringing up large numbers of new devices into the care of the Network Controller.
  • NSO (Network Services Orchestrator) is responsible for touching devices and maintaining their intended configuration and service state. We will not be installing that in this lab, but it is part of this setup.
  • SR-PCE is a Cisco, standards-based Path Computation Engine, and one of the key components in interacting with the network for Trafiic Engineering and topology information. We will not be installing that in this lab, but it is part of this setup.

Scenarios

  • Scenario 1.      Inspecting VCenter
  • Scenario 2.      Deploying Crosswork Infrastructure Cluster
  • Scenario 3.      Deploying Crosswork Data Gateway OVA
  • Scenario 4.      Installing Applications
  • Scenario 5.      Adding Credential Profiles and Provider Access
  • Scenario 6.      Onboarding Devices

Resources