DATA SHEET
The Cisco CNS Network Registrar® is part of the Cisco® CNS Family of software and appliance-based applications, which support scalable network deployment, configuration, service-assurance monitoring, and on-demand service delivery. Cisco CNS intelligent networking technology is tightly coupled with the network elements by embedded device intelligence. Cisco CNS applications reduce capital expenditures (CapEx) by consolidating management capability into Cisco devices, decrease operating expenses (OpEx) through automation of manual procedures, and increase revenue opportunities by supporting new services and business models.
PRODUCT INTRODUCTION
Cisco CNS Network Registrar is a full-featured Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) system that provides scalable naming and addressing services for enterprise and service provider networks. Cisco CNS Network Registrar significantly improves the reliability of naming and addressing services for enterprise networks. For cable providers, Cisco CNS Network Registrar provides scalable DNS and DHCP services and forms the basis of a DOCSIS® cable modem provisioning system. For other telecom service providers, Cisco CNS Network Registrar continues to play an important factor in service activation for data, voice over IP, and mobile communications.
Cisco CNS Network Registrar includes a standards-compliant DNS server that offers the most advanced feature set in the industry including support for incremental zone transfers, and dynamic updates and notification. Cisco CNS Network Registrar DHCP server supports DHCP Safe Failover (redundant DHCP servers), dynamic DNS updates, DOCSIS cable modems, and integration with directory services using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol Version 3 (LDAPv3). Moreover, tight integration with devices running Cisco IOS® Software further elevates the value of the Cisco network solution.
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
The Cisco CNS Network Registrar provides IP address-management provisioning with highly scalable and reliable DNS, DHCP, and Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) services to help enable efficient and effective provisioning of network devices and services. Its rich and extensible feature sets easily distinguish Cisco CNS Network Registrar from DHCP and DNS servers packaged with a commercial operating system. Cisco CNS Network Registrar can help reduce OpEx with the central-management capability, which simplifies administrative tasks and reduces tedious and error-prone operations associated with network and device configuration.
The Cisco CNS Network Registrar implements a complete DNS, DHCP, and TFTP server, and provides both graphically based and scriptable command-line interface (CLI) administrative functions to help customers configure, automate, and simplify IP networking services. It supports business-critical tasks such as client configuration and provisioning for numerous devices and service models for both service provider and enterprise customers. Its ability to interoperate with Microsoft-based client devices and Active Directory allows customers to use the Cisco CNS Network Registrar in a complementary role with the basic Microsoft DHCP and DNS servers.
The Cisco CNS Network Registrar automates common tasks such as IP-address assignment and management, DHCP and client policy definition and distribution, and day-to-day server maintenance to simplify IP network configuration and administration. Features such as the LDAP directory interface facilitate integration of DNS and DHCP services with other network-management and client- or service-provisioning applications. Performance-optimized functions provide fast setup and task execution, and an availability-tuned architecture helps to ensure reliable and consistent client-services delivery.
IMPORTANT FEATURES AND BENEFITS
Cisco CNS Network Registrar is based on a distributed architecture that delivers the highest DNS and DHCP performance in its class. Moreover, its carrier-class reliability is widely recognized as demonstrated in many service provider networks handling tens of thousands of network clients. Cisco CNS Network Registrar 6.1 further heightens its leadership with the following new features.
Regional Cluster
Regional cluster provides central-management capability in Cisco CNS Network Registrar. Each regional cluster consists of one or more of the followings: Central Configuration Management (CCM) server, router interface configuration (RIC) server, a Tomcat Web server, servlet engine, and server agent. The regional cluster serves as the aggregate management server for up to 100 local clusters, each of which is a collection of DNS, DHCP, and TFTP servers deployed in the network. Interaction with the regional cluster is made through the Web user interface. With regional cluster, the administrator can configure and control the local clusters from a centralized location, thus enabling coordination of local cluster management across multiple network domains to provide a consistent and unified IP address-policy implementation.
Address Space Management
Address space management simplifies the task of managing address blocks and can be exercised from the regional cluster and is a feature in the regional cluster. An address block can contain static or dynamic addresses, and can have any number of child address blocks culminating in one or more subnets. An administrator can break an address block into small units and push the smaller blocks to a local cluster. Similarly, the administrator can also consolidate address blocks in the local cluster under their parent to provide a unified view of the address space. Instead of traversing every single local cluster to gather subnet-usage and lease-history information, administrators can achieve the same result from the regional cluster, thus making the task of collecting usage data simple and virtually effortless. Without an automated solution, the complexity of managing address blocks can be high and the task can be tedious and time-consuming.
Cluster Management
Cluster management allows central management of address space and global protocol server configuration, such as policies, client classes, and scope templates. Using the Web user interface, the administrator at the regional cluster can add and manage a list of Cisco CNS Network Registrar local clusters and their credentials. With this capability, the administrator can create and manage a list of local clusters using the Web user interface on the regional cluster. To further ease the administrative task, the administrator can centrally manage the local clusters, for example creating, pulling, and pushing VPNs, and managing DHCP client classes, scope templates, policies, failover pairs, and zone distribution. Through the Web user interface, the administrator can also pull subnet usage and IP lease history data from the local clusters. The Single Sign-On feature allows the administrator to traverse the local clusters without reauthentication.
Router Interface Configuration Management
The RIC server manages the router interfaces on Cisco uBR7246VXR Universal Broadband router and Cisco uBR10012 Universal Broadband Router. An administrator with the ric-management role can retrieve and view the router's primary IP address, subnet, and interface names. Moreover, the administrator can change the router description, address of the primary subnet on the interface, address of the secondary subnet on the interface, IP helper, address of cable helper, owner, and region where the router is deployed. As changes are made to the router over time, the RIC server will synchronize with the router to incorporate these changes. The default communication between the RIC server and the Cisco uBR7246VXR and Cisco uBR10012 is Telnet. If a secured connection is necessary, the administrator can connect to these routers using Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol and still have Telnet as the backup underlying transport vehicle if there is difficulty setting up SSH communication. With the RIC server, Cisco CNS Network registrar delivers a centralized-management approach to help administrators achieve high productivity through integrated systemic manageability.
DHCP Enhancements
Two major enhancements available in Cisco CNS Network Registrar 6.1 include new lease-allocation options, and improved IP-history performance.
By default, Cisco CNS Network Registrar pools the available leases from all scopes on the same subnet and offers them, in a Round Robin fashion, to any client that requests a lease. Cisco CNS Network Registrar 6.1 gives the users the option to have leases allocated by priority or by first-available. With priority allocation, each scope is assigned a priority and leases are handed out from scopes with the higher priority until the addresses in all the scopes are exhausted. If first-available is selected, Cisco CNS Network Registrar assigns the address that is first available. The two new DHCP-allocation options give the administrator the flexibility to implement a more deterministic address-allocation strategy.
The IP lease-history feature has been enhanced in Cisco CNS Network Registrar 6.1 to significantly improve server performance when this feature is enabled. The lease-history data is no longer stored in a separate database; it is now maintained concurrently within the active lease data. To ensure that the database does not drop data due to lack of disk space, automatic trimming can be performed for records older than ip-history-max-age, which by default is set to four weeks. This feature intelligently provides an audit mechanism in Cisco CNS Network Registrar while delivering the high performance and scalability required to manage large networks.
DNS Enhancements
Major DNS enhancements in Cisco CNS Network Registrar 6.1 include transaction signature-enabled (TSIG, as defined in RFC 3495) zone transfer, restricted query access-control lists (ACLs), named ACLs, and statistical counters for measuring DNS performance.
To continue support for securing data and operations, Cisco CNS Network Registrar 6.1 allows users to restrict DNS zone transfers based on TSIG. TSIG data can include a list of server IP addresses, networks, and TSIG keys. TSIG is a mechanism for securing DNS messages. The advantages of TSIG over other security mechanisms are that it is relatively simple to configure, lightweight for revolvers and name servers to use, and flexible enough to secure DNS messages. With TSIG enabled, users can verify dynamic DNS-update and zone-transfer requests and responses to come from an authorized source. With the restricted query ACLs feature, the administrator can constrain clients to querying only certain servers based on the source IP address, source network address, or ACL.
Currently, Cisco CNS Network Registrar has a health indicator that is either 1 or 10 and is not enough to gauge server performance. It is very desirable for customers and test engineers alike to have more detailed performance measurements, for queries, dynamic updates, and transfers, as well as errors in various protocol states. Several counters are added in Cisco CNS Network Registrar 6.1 to provide more detailed performance measurements for the DNS server. These counters provide more information than a value between 1 and 10 when gauging the health of the DNS server and can potentially assist with identifying areas in the DNS servers that can be reconfigured to deliver a better throughput.
Web User Interface Enhancements
Cisco CNS Network Registrar 6.1 adds the following roles to facilitate Web-based administration for the new features and capabilities:
• regional-admin-Regional administrator that has permission to administer the tasks carried out at the regional cluster, such as creating and managing regional cluster administrators, viewing the Central Configuration Management (CCM) database change logs and tasks, and assigning owner to a region.
• central-cfg-admin-This role is responsible for central configuration administration. The tasks involve managing clusters, routers, interfaces, VPNs, policies, and scope templates including pulling them from, and pushing them to the local clusters.
• regional-cfg-admin-This role is usually focused on managing and delegating address blocks and subnets, managing address destinations, and collecting subnet usage and lease historical data.
Finally, the Web user interface is extended to ease the task of managing license keys. The administrator can now list, add, and remove license keys from the user interface.
Licensing Update
Cisco CNS Network Registrar is licensed based on the number of IP nodes. This strategy continues in release 6.1. However, the new license key is needed to activate the regional cluster, address-space management, and router-interface configuration management.
Table 1 shows the system requirements for Cisco CNS Network Registrar 6.1.
Table 1. Cisco CNS Network Registrar System Requirements
SERVICE AND SUPPORT
Cisco Systems® offers a range of services programs to accelerate customer success. These innovative services programs are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners, resulting in high levels of customer satisfaction. Cisco services help you to protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare the network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business. For more information about Cisco services, see Cisco Technical Support Services or Cisco Advanced Services.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
For more information about the Cisco CNS Network Registrar, visit www.cisco.com or contact your local account representative.