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Table Of Contents
Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 Release Notes
System Recommendations and Platform Support
New Features and Enhancements in Prime Provisioning 6.3
Product Renaming to Prime Provisioning
VPLS with Multi-Segment Pseudowires over MPLS-TP
Default and untagged matching for Ethernet service
Ethernet A and Z end VLAN Tagging
MPLS Transport Profile New Features
MPLS-TP Topology Integration with Prime Network
MPLS-TP on ASR 9000 (with IOS XR)
Restructuring of the Documentation Set
Prime Provisioning 6.3 Resolved and Open Bugs
Finding Known Problems in Prime Provisioning 6.3
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 Release Notes
August 28, 2012OL-27133-01
All documentation, including this Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 Release Notes document and any or all parts of the Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 documentation set, might be upgraded over time. Therefore, we recommend you access Prime Provisioning 6.3 documentation set online at:
http://www.cisco.com/go/provisioning
You can also navigate to this documentation set by clicking Help on the Home Page of the Prime Provisioning 6.3 product.
The information in this release notes provides an overview of this release and helps you understand it at a high level. After reading the Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 Documentation Overview, please read this release note prior to reading any other documentation for Prime Provisioning 6.3.
URLs for base information about Prime Provisioning 6.3, a product overview, and suggested reading order of these documents is given in Related Documentation.
Contents
This document includes the following sections:
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System Recommendations and Platform Support
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Introduction
Prime Provisioning is a management solution for network fulfillment and diagnostics that enables the automation and scaling of complex, policy-driven network provisioning tasks to produce consistent and reliable service deployments. Prime Provisioning does this by planning, provisioning, and auditing services across core, aggregation, access, and consumer premises equipment devices.
Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 provides full life cycle service management including MPLS Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), MPLS Traffic Engineering (MPLS TE), MPLS Transport Profile (MPLS TP), Metro Ethernet Forum compliant Carrier Ethernet services and TDM over MPLS services, SAToP, and CESoPSN.
Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 introduces a number of new features for MPLS TP, e.g. VPLS with statically allocated labels over multi-segment pseudowires over MPLS-TP, support for MPLS-TP topology changes and MPLS-TP provisioning on the ASR 9000. The changes related to MPLS-TP discovery and topology are highlighted.
Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 leverages Cisco Prime Network to manage MPLS-TP network topologies. Please see www.cisco.com/go/prime-ipngn for the complete portfolio of Prime for IP NGN.
Cisco Prime Provisioning includes configuration and functional audits as well as pro-active diagnostic tools for MPLS VPNs to ensure services are consistent across the network, significantly reduces time to repair for critical services.
System Recommendations and Platform Support
The system recommendations and requirements are listed in Cisco Prime Provisioning Supported Devices 6.3. It includes the network devices and related software supported with Prime Provisioning 6.3. We recommend that you thoroughly review that list before even planning your installation, to be sure you have all the hardware and software needed for a successful installation. We also recommend that you review the section Important Notes, in this release note in order to be aware of any known system, installation, or other issues in the current release.
New Features and Enhancements in Prime Provisioning 6.3
Prime Provisioning 6.3 is based on Cisco Prime Fulfillment 6.2 with the addition of new and changed information that was introduced in Cisco Prime Fulfillment 6.2.1.
See Release Notes for Cisco Prime Fulfillment 6.2.1 for more information on the Cisco Prime Fulfillment 6.2.1 release. With the addition of new features, information from the previous release notes has been included in the Prime Provisioning 6.3 documentation set.
Prime Provisioning 6.3 includes problems fixed since Cisco Prime Fulfillment 6.2.1. See Prime Provisioning 6.3 Resolved and Open Bugs.
Note
Items specific to Prime Provisioning 6.3 include the new and changed information as documented in the following sections:
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General New Features
All the new features introduced in this release are explained in the Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 User Guide.
This section includes new system level features added in Prime Provisioning 6.3:
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Product Renaming to Prime Provisioning
The product is now called Prime Provisioning as the product portfolio in the Fulfillment area has been expanded. In addition to this Prime Provisioning product, there are two new products called Prime Order Fulfillment and Prime Active Catalog. Please see the Fulfillment family product page for more information: http://www.cisco.com/go/fulfillment
Prime for IPNGN 1.1
Prime Provisioning 6.3 is compatible with Prime for IPNGN suite version 1.1. New suite integration features include secure communication among the applications in the Prime for IPNGN suite using https.
See the Prime for IPNGN web page for more information: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps12290/index.html
Usability
Prime Provisioning 6.3 introduces a number of usability enhancements:
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L2VPN New Features
All L2VPN features are explained in detail in the Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 User Guide.
This section includes new features for multiple components that were added in Prime Provisioning 6.3:
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VPLS with Multi-Segment Pseudowires over MPLS-TP
Prime Provisioning now enables provisioning of VPLS over an MPLS-TP enabled network. Some or all of the LSPs interconnecting the VPLS instances can be admitted onto existing MPLS-TP tunnels (which may have been provisioned using Prime Provisioning). The LSPs may be configured as multi-segment pseudowires, where each hop can be admitted onto an MPLS-TP tunnel. Prime Provisioning will automatically route the multi-segment pseudowire along the shortest path, taking into consideration any included and/or excluded nodes and/or tunnels. The LSP/pseudowire labels may be statically allocated by Prime Provisioning.
Statically allocating pseudowire label eliminates the need for a directed protocol to be run within the VPLS to do label exchange and therefore eliminates the need for IP connectivity between the endpoints in the VPLS.
Prime Provisioning manages a pool of static MPLS labels that is shared across VPLS and MPLS-TP services.
Labels already in use are discovered and removed from the label pool to ensure unique allocation of MPLS labels.
In Prime Provisioning 6.3, the multi-segment feature is limited to VPLS provisioning only. Also, in this version every segment has to be admitted onto an MPLS-TP tunnel.
Default and untagged matching for Ethernet service
Prime Provisioning enables you to configure a default Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) matching criteria when provisioning Ethernet services. This allows the matching of any ethernet frame that is not already matched by another service instance on the same interface.
It is also possible to create a service instance to match untagged frames. These features are available when the access interface is located on the N-PEs.
Default matching was already present in Prime Provisioning but with a much less intuitive UI. This feature can be accessed by entering a dummy outer VLAN on the match criteria, and by selecting default encapsulation on the next page of the wizard. It would still work for backward compatibility.
Ethernet A and Z end VLAN Tagging
Prime Provisioning now support the ability to edit the Inner VLAN ranges or outer VLAN ranges flag when creating the service request. The VLAN ranges are allowed to be controllable only at the policy level. In particular, this enables the creation of a pseudowire where on one access port you have an outer VLAN range, and on the other you have an inner VLAN range. It was not possible in the past because both ports were controlled by one policy.
MPLS Transport Profile New Features
See the Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 User Guide for further information about MPLS-TP. This section includes:
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MPLS-TP Topology Integration with Prime Network
Prime Provisioning will retrieve the MPLS-TP topology from Prime Network. This change enables discovery on IOS-XR devices and removes the requirement to run CDP in your network to discover the physical topology.
This includes MPLS-TP enabled nodes and links. Prime Network is now a prerequisite for provisioning of MPLS-TP tunnels with Prime Provisioning. For more information about this feature, see http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11348/index.html.
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MPLS-TP Topology Change
Prime Provisioning supports management of changes in the MPLS-TP topology. After making topology changes in the network, including node and/or link insertion and/or removal, you can re-synchronize Prime Provisioning with Prime Network in order to learn about the topology changes. The re-synchronization can be targeted towards, e.g., only the newly inserted node. Any MPLS-TP tunnel Service Requests that are impacted by the topology change will automatically recalculate the tunnel path (for working and/or protect path) and the Service Request will enter the Requested state so that the operator can review and deploy the modified tunnel. Discovery updates the affected Service Request (SR) history report with state transition, affected LSP (working path), and new path calculated by discovery.
MPLS-TP on ASR 9000 (with IOS XR)
Prime Provisioning now supports provisioning of MPLS-TP tunnels on ASR 9000 series devices with IOS XR 4.2 and 4.2.1. The ASR 9000 devices can be MPLS TP endpoint and midpoint.
API New Features
All Application Programming Interface (API) features are explained in detail in the Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 API Programmer Guide and the accompanying Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 API Programmer Reference.
New features added in Prime Provisioning are generally available via both the GUI and APIs. See the respective sections in this document for a description of new features under each service.
Following MPLS-TP Discovery operations are supported via NBI
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Restructuring of the Documentation Set
The Prime Provisioning documentation set updated for this release is as follows:
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Important Notes
This section lists known bugs and issues to be aware of in this release. These are listed in the following categories:
Installation Notes
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http://www.cisco.com/pcgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/isc
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For information about the installation process, see the Cisco Prime Provisioning 6.3 Installation Guide .
Web Browser Support
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To view fonts and colors correctly, the system display must be set to use a color quality of at least 32-bits.
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Workaround: Try selecting individual subsections (broken, working, or to be deployed).
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Workaround: Increase the browser timeout value.
Prime Provisioning 6.3 Resolved and Open Bugs
The following bugs were resolved in Prime Provisioning 6.3:
The following open bugs apply to Prime Provisioning 6.3:
Finding Known Problems in Prime Provisioning 6.3
To find known problems in Prime Provisioning 6.3, use the following URL:
http://tools.cisco.com/Support/Bug Tool Kit
You must log into Cisco.com.
You can search for specific bugs or search for a range by product name. This tool enables you to query for keywords, severity, range, or version.
Use the following search criteria to locate bugs for Prime Provisioning 6.3:
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The results display bug ID and title, found-in version, fixed-in version, and status. The bug ID is a hyperlink to detailed information for the bug ID's product, component, severity, first found-in, and release notes.
The results could be displayed in a feature matrix or spreadsheet.
Related Documentation
The entire documentation set for Prime Provisioning, can be accessed at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps12199/tsd_products_support_series_home.html
or at:
http://www.cisco.com/go/provisioning
The following documents comprise the Prime Provisioning 6.3 documentation set:
General Documentation (in suggested reading order)
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API Documentation
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Other Cisco Prime Product Documentation
See also the documentation for the following Cisco Prime products:
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Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
For information on obtaining documentation, submitting a service request, and gathering additional information, see the monthly What's New in Cisco Product Documentation, which also lists all new and revised Cisco technical documentation, at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/whatsnew/whatsnew.html
Subscribe to the What's New in Cisco Product Documentation as a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed and set content to be delivered directly to your desktop using a reader application. The RSS feeds are a free service. Cisco currently supports RSS Version 2.0.
Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)
Any Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and phone numbers used in this document are not intended to be actual addresses and phone numbers. Any examples, command display output, network topology diagrams, and other figures included in the document are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any use of actual IP addresses or phone numbers in illustrative content is unintentional and coincidental.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
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