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Cisco® Network Registrar® 6.2 is an IP address management application that supports scalable network deployment, configuration, service-assurance monitoring, and on-demand service delivery. It supports Cisco Intelligent Information Network architecture. Its advanced features add intelligence in the network and give service providers and enterprise customers a flexible IP address solution that meets their business needs. Furthermore, the application is a carrier-class solution, proven through deployments by thousands of customers worldwide. Its rich interfaces help users reduce operational costs through automation of manual procedures. Finally, Cisco Network Registrar can help users increase revenue opportunities through consistent automated policies to support new services and business models.
PRODUCT INTRODUCTION
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 is a full-featured Domain Name System/Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DNS/DHCP) system that provides scalable naming and addressing services for enterprise and service provider networks. It significantly improves the reliability of naming and addressing services for enterprise networks. For cable providers, the application provides scalable DNS and DHCP services for hundreds of thousands of devices and forms the basis of a DOCSIS® cable modem provisioning system. For telecom service providers, it continues to play an important role in service activation for data, voice over IP (VoIP), and mobile services.
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 includes a standards-compliant DNS server that offers the most advanced feature set in the industry, including support for incremental zone transfers, dynamic updates, and notifications. The Cisco Network Registrar DHCP server supports DHCP failover with 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 Cisco IOS® Software devices further elevates the value of the Cisco Powered Network solution.
The Cisco Network Registrar scalable deployment architecture consists of several local clusters and one regional cluster. The local cluster is deployed in the network to handle DNS and DHCP services, whereas the regional cluster is usually deployed at the data center or the network operations center (NOC) to centrally manage the local clusters.
The regional cluster implements many IP Address Management (IPAM) features to help users reduce operational costs. With IPAM, Cisco Network Registrar administrators can control and monitor DNS and DHCP servers from a centralized location. This capability eliminates many manual, repetitive, and error-prone tasks configuring the local servers deployed in the network, and allows for a single point of data aggregation and delegation.
Address space management simplifies the task of managing address blocks and can be exercised from 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 put the smaller blocks in a local cluster. Similarly, the administrator can also roll up address blocks in the local cluster under their parent to provide a unified view of the address space. Instead of traversing every local cluster to gather subnet usage and lease history information, Cisco Network Registrar 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, management of address blocks can be very complex, tedious, and time-consuming.
The regional cluster manages and monitors the local clusters through its cluster management capability, which 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 Network Registrar local clusters and their credentials. With this capability, administrators can create and manage a list of local clusters using the Web user interface on the regional cluster. In addition, administrators can centrally manage the local clusters, such as creating, pulling, and pushing VPNs, DHCP client classes, scope templates, and policies; managing failover pairs; and handling zone distribution. Through the Web user interface, the Cisco Network Registrar administrator can also pull subnet use and IP lease history data from the local clusters.
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
The Cisco Network Registrar product provides highly scalable and reliable DNS, DHCP, and Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) services to enable efficient and effective provisioning of network devices and services. Its rich and extensible feature sets easily distinguish the application from any other DHCP and DNS servers packaged in the market today. Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 can help reduce operational cost with the central management capability, simplifying administrative tasks and reducing tedious and error-prone operations associated with network and device configuration.
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 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 streamline 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 Microsoft Active Directory allows customers to use the Cisco Network Registrar product in a complementary role with the basic Microsoft DHCP and DNS servers.
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 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 and streamline 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-provisioning or service-provisioning applications. Performance-optimized functions provide fast setup and task execution, and an availability-tuned architecture helps ensure reliable and consistent client services delivery.
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 supports consistent implementation of policies, client classes, and scope templates through the cluster management capability. With the concise reporting features, the administrator can also pull subnet usage and IP lease history data from the local clusters.
KEY FEATURES AND BENEFITS
The Cisco Network Registrar solution is based on a distributed architecture that delivers the highest DNS and DHCP performance in its class. With the latest release, the solution continues to further heighten its leadership with the following new features:
IPv6
As more and more devices are connected to the Internet, they consume more and more of the remaining available IPv4 public addresses. This problem is not isolated to one specific geographical area and is a major concern for many service providers and large enterprises worldwide. The U.S Government mandates support for IPv6 from the equipment vendors by 2007. Asia today has less than a Class "A" of address space, and this lack of address space can prove a deterrent to the large growth in networking. Europe and Japan are in a similar state, with a limited supply of IPv4 addresses.
Cisco Systems® is a leader in providing IPv6 networks, and the Cisco Network Registrar solution leads with implementation of DHCPv6 and DNSv6 protocols per IETF standards, allowing users to start rolling out IPv6 network services.
For DHCPv6, Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 supports:
• Stateless autoconfiguration-This is a critical feature of IPv6 per RFC 3736. Stateless autoconfiguration enables serverless-mode basic configuration of the IPv6 nodes and allows for easy renumbering. The DHCPv6 server does not assign addresses but instead provides configuration parameters, such as DNS server information, to these clients.
• Stateful autoconfiguration-This feature assigns addresses and provides configuration parameters to clients.
• Prefix Delegation (PD, as specified in RFC 3633)-The DHCPv6 server delegates a live prefix to a router across an administrative boundary.
For DNSv6, Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 supports:
• AAAA resource records, pointer (PTR) resource records for resolving DNS queries to IPv6 addresses, and the ipv6.arpa for reverse lookup.
• First-hop query support for clients over IPv6 (User Datagram Protocol [UDP] and TCP)-This feature allows the Cisco Network Registrar DNS server to be used by IPv6-only clients to resolve DNS queries.
• Policy update and access-control-list (ACL) support for IPv6 addresses
With support for IPv6, Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 allows users to access an immensely larger address space and define a multilevel hierarchical global routing architecture. The vastly greater availability of 128-bit IPv6 addresses eliminates the need for private address spaces. ISPs will have enough addresses to allocate to smaller businesses and dial-in users who need globally unique addresses to fully exploit the Internet.
Dynamic Scope Management
Many customers create large numbers of IP scopes representing their network address space. However, a change, no matter how minor it is, made to a scope requires the Cisco Network Registrar DHCP server to reload all the scopes. As the number of scopes grows, the longer the reload time becomes. Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 adds support for dynamic scope management to allow a Cisco Network Registrar administrator to make dynamic changes to the scopes and have the changes become effective immediately without a server reload. This feature increases the Cisco Network Registrar DHCP server uptime to manage critical applications that are intolerable to slow response. It can also help increase operational efficiency, especially in the case where changes to scopes are frequently made. The reload time compounded over a period of time can become significant and result in low customer satisfaction.
Central DNS Configuration
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 continues to extend IPAM features with support for full DNS administrative operations from the regional cluster, including complete management of forward and reverse zone, resource records, host records, and full access to the local cluster DNS server. Although DNS administration is possible from the regional cluster, the local administrator can still have custom configuration of the DNS for specific zones. The solution also supports two modes of DNS configuration:
• In the staged mode, any changes made to the zones become effective in the regional cluster, but are not immediately propagated to the local DNS servers. Such updates are propagated to local DNS servers when the user requests a synchronization action (described later in this document).
• By contrast, in the synchronous mode, the regional cluster attempts to propagate host and protected resource records data as "live" resource records at the appropriate DNS servers in the best-effort fashion. Any resource records that were not written in the last write are updated in the local server the next time the regional and local servers are synchronized.
This feature gives the regional cluster administrator full access to configure the DNS servers deployed in the network and gives the administrator a more efficient way to manage DNS servers from a central location, hence reducing operational costs.
High-Availability DNS
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 adds High-Availability DNS to improve service reliability. When the DHCP server assigns an IP address to a client, it can update the primary DNS server with a new resource record containing the IP address. The secondary DNS servers can synchronize with the primary DNS server to have their database updated. However, if the DHCP server cannot communicate with the primary DNS server for a DNS update, or the secondary servers cannot communicate with the primary server, the information in their database can potentially become obsolete and affect services. Undoubtedly, the primary DNS server needs to be available to receive updates from the DHCP server and to update secondary DNS servers.
With High-Availability DNS, users can deploy a hot-standby backup primary server to ensure the namespace information can be updated at all times. This feature is critical to minimizing service outage.
DHCP Load-Balancing Failover
In a DHCP failover deployment, the main server handles all the DHCP services during normal operation and the backup server stays idle. The backup server steps in only when it detects that the main server is down. To improve the DHCP throughput, Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 supports DHCP load-balancing failover deployment in which the backup DHCP server can offload a percentage of the DHCP request population. Through this support, users can take better advantage of the CPU resources on both servers, resulting in shorter response time when processing DHCP requests.
SNMP Manageability
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 helps users manage the DNS and DHCP servers through a built-in Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agent. This capability allows users to retrieve solicited information in addition to traps from DHCP and DNS servers. With a single console to manage various applications, users see a dashboard displaying the health of all the critical applications and resources. At a glance, users can determine if there is a potential problem in the network and can address the problem immediately. SNMP manageability helps users view and manage the Cisco Network Registrar solution from the same console. This capability facilitates management of the solution using the existing management system, rather than spending money to acquire and train staff to learn a new management solution, hence reducing operational costs. Furthermore, taking advantage of the existing network management infrastructure can help users transparently integrate the solution in their overall management strategy.
DHCP Enhancements
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 offers several other DHCP enhancements, including extended lease reservation and improved option handling.
Lease reservation is used to assign a static IP address to a device by mapping the device MAC address to an IP address; the device is always assigned the same IP address. Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 allows users to configure lease reservation using information other than MAC address. If the device breaks down and has to be replaced, the user can replace the broken device with a new one without having to reconfigure the lease reservation for the new device.
As more CableLabs® compliant devices are introduced by cable multiple system operators (MSOs) and IPv6 adoption increases, the need for defining a user's own option will become greater. Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 reduces the complexity of creating a user's own DHCP option definition. Furthermore, users can easily add, modify, and delete option and suboption definitions from the base DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 specification. Using the Web interface, users can define complex options composed of various data types and specify the name fields with associated value ranges. When new options are created, they can become effective and used with scope policy right away.
DNS Update Policy
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 provides a policy-based mechanism to update resource records. Rather than solely relying on ACLs, it allows users to create a policy to specify the criteria used to process update requests. In each policy, the user indicates:
• The type of resource record
• The ACL applied to the update request
• Additional information used to match the resource records to be updated; for example, all records begin with "dhcp_"
• Granting or denial of the records that match the criteria
Through this enhancement, users can define a flexible DNS update policy that meets their operational needs without having to manually intervene for each DNS update transaction.
Web User Interface Enhancements
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 allows users to have full DNS administrative control from the regional cluster. This capability allows users to administer common DNS services from a central location to ensure consistent namespace implementation throughout the network.
To help users protect the configuration information maintained on the local cluster, the solution lets users back up the configuration data and archive this information in the regional cluster database. If there is a catastrophic incident, users can recover the configuration data from the regional cluster. If the configuration is common across the local clusters, users can quickly configure a new server by replicating the archived configuration data on the new server.
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 provides tools for users to generate address space reports and submit these reports to regional Internet Registries that govern the allocation and use of IP address space. The report support format is mandated by a Shared WHOIS (SWIP) process. The report contains the following:
• Information to identify the organization using the subdelegated address blocks
• Registration information for each IP address block
• Tracking information on use of allocated IP address blocks to determine if additional allocations may be justified
Licensing Update
Cisco Network Registrar 6.2 has been and continues to be licensed based on the number of IP nodes. In addition to this licensing policy, separate license keys are needed to activate the regional cluster, router interface configuration management, and IPv6 features.
System requirements are given in Table 1.
Table 1. System Requirements
SERVICE AND SUPPORT
Cisco offers a wide 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 protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare your network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business. For more information about Cisco services, refer to Cisco Technical Support Services or Cisco Advanced Services.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
For more information about the Cisco Network Registrar solution, visit www.cisco.com or contact your local Cisco account representative.