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Cisco CSR1000v Virtual Router for Cloud Services

Today I am going to talk about the Cisco CSR1000v router used for the cloud services. With the help of Cisco CSR 1000v router you will able to connect the public and the private clouds and use the applications smoothly.

What is the purpose of Cisco CSR 1000v routers ?
With the help of Cisco CSR1000V we can use the cloud-based networking and security issues to access the public and private clouds applications. Cisco CSR1000v uses the same type of Cisco IOS Software platform that is inside the Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) product families.

If you talk about the Cisco CSR1000v, the virtual router contains the features like routing, VPN, firewall, Network Address Translation (NAT), QoS, application visibility, fail-over, and WAN optimization. These functions empower enterprises and cloud providers to build highly secure, optimized, scalable, and consistent hybrid networks.

If Cisco CSR 1000v is a virtual router then how and where it runs ?
Well Cisco CSR1000v is a virtual router and run on VM. for running the Cisco CSR1000v you should have a UCS server where VM will be installed and on top of the VM, Cisco CST 1000v router IOS image will be configured. Well I am taking Cisco server as an example only( UCS server). you can have another servers as well to host the VM based CSR 1000v router. 

So any server which is capable of VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, or Red Hat KVM virtualization can be used to host the Cisco CSR1000v virtual cloud based router.

Fig 1.1- Cisco 1000v CSR router

How many types of network topology we can have with the Cisco CSR 1000v router or you can say how many ways we can use Cisco CSR1000v router ?


You can use Cisco CSR1000v with the four different requirements:

  • Secure VPN gateway: With the Cisco CSR1000v as a secure VPN gateway, we can use various features like IPSEC, DMVPN, EasyVPN, FlexVPN, BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, Zone based Firewall, ACL, AAA, NAT and DHCP features. You can deploy the CSR 1000v router in the cloud and will be managed by Cisco Prime infrastructure.
  • MPLS WAN endpoint: Cisco CSR1000v as a MPLS WAN endpoint you can use the various features like MPLS, VRF, BGP, GRE tunneling, QOS and IP SLA features. A typical cloud network is highly switched - a router hands off incoming traffic to a group of switches, which assign the traffic to customer VLANs. In this network architecture, the cloud provider cannot scale beyond 4096 VLANs per router, limiting the number of customers it can support. The CSR1000V, serving as a customer edge or provider edge (PE) extension, can help overcome these scale limitations by creating routing overlays within the cloud 
  • Layer 2 (virtual-machine migration) or Layer 3 Extension (IP Mobility) from premises to cloud: Cisco CSR1000v as a Layer 2 or Layer 3 extension to the cloud with the features like LISP, NAT and OTV. Cisco CSR1000V can serve as an OTV router, building a bridge with an OTV-enabled router in the enterprise’s data center that enables a VLAN to be extended to the cloud. 
  • Control point for networking services: With the help of the CSR1000V we can redirect traffic to Cisco Virtual Wide Area Application Services (vWAAS) appliances deployed in the cloud. Cisco CSR1000v also provide you the Application Visibility and Control (AVC) feature which has end-to-end application visibility, performance monitoring, and control, allowing service providers to pinpoint application performance problems and offer performance SLAs that are easily tracked. So the features like Zone based Firewalls, NAT, DHCP, HSRP and AVC will be provided.