Cisco ACI: Part 1-Multi-Site Orchestrator Deployment (MSO)

Today we are going to talk about how to upload MSO image to Nexus Dashboard and then how to enable MSO. You may already knew that the deployment and configuration of MSO will be performed from within the Nexus Dashboard interface.

What is Nexus Dashboard?
Going forward Cisco tries to simplify the things by adding Cisco Nexus Dashboard which is a single launch point to monitor and scale across different sites, whether it is Cisco ACI, the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), or the Cloud APIC running in a public cloud provider environment. So in short, Nexus Dashboard is managing all.

What is MSO ?
MSO is Multi-Site Orchestrator and helps to monitor the health score state for all the interconnected sites. It can provide Provisioning of day-0 configuration to establish inter-site EVPN control plane. ACI MSO can handles various APIC controllers and pushed policies on all the ACI fabrics so it is complementary to APIC controllers.

Fig 1.1- MSO in the design

Upload MSO Image to Nexus Dashboard & Enable
First you need to install the install services for MSO. Alternatively, if Internet connectivity is available, the App Store tab may be used instead. Below is the screen shot helps you to understand step by step.

Fig 1.2- Nexus Dashboard

A tile for MSO will be displayed once the application has been uploaded to Nexus Dashboard or downloaded via the App Store. 

Fig 1.3- Upload MSO image

After uploading MSO image to Nexus Dashboard, the next step is to enable MSO (Multi-Site Orchestrator)

Fig 1.4- MSO Service Catalog

Choose Enable to deploy the MSO application across the Nexus Dashboard cluster.

Once the application has been enabled across the cluster, the MSO tile will display the option to Open the application.

Fig 1.5- Enable MSO

MSO Backup Configuration
For the MSO Backup configuration, you have two options, one is on the remote location and other option is using backup & restore and provide path for backup as shown below.

Option 1: Operations --> Remote Locations --> Add Remote Location
Option 2: Operations --> Backup & Restore --> New Backup

We will come up other managed features and operation functionality in Cisco ACI and Nexus Dashboard in our next article.