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Introduction to Cisco Prime Infrastructure 3.0- Automation and Network Visibility

Cisco Prime products bring next-generation administration by associate an intuitive workflow positioned user experience and incorporated lifecycle acts across Cisco architectures, technologies, and networks. The Cisco Prime product portfolio brings integrated management resolutions that support the merging of networks, technologies, and services.

Cisco Prime for Service Providers is a segmental and complete portfolio of network management resolutions. These solutions help hasten the time to value of inventive Cisco architectures by associate all kind of management of progressed programmable networks, mobility, video, cloud, and managed services.
Cisco Prime Infrastructure deals a single pane of glass assessment to all of their network users, apps and devices (wired and wireless), and provides visibility to application and end user experience.

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud helps allow enterprise IT professionals and service providers convey highly protected on demand IT which can be ITaaS. ITaaS stands for IT as a service. By creating a more active and cost-effective service-delivery vehicle, IT professionals can proactively meet the increasing needs of a corporate.

What is the use of Cisco Prime ?
With the help of Cisco prime you can do a lot of things in your network.
  • Cisco Prime can do network service provisioning, monitoring and assurance and change and compliance management.
  • These technologies include NetFlow, Network-Based Application Recognition 2 (NBAR2), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and more. Cisco Prime Infrastructure can also trigger capture, processing and drill-down into application performance and packet diagnostics data from distributed Cisco Network Analysis Module (NAM) deployments.
  • For Wireless devices, simplified client troubleshooting enables network operators to easily identify the root cause of client issues in a graphical format, speeding up problem identification and resolution
  • Cisco Prime Infrastructure delivers scalable management and service assurance across the breadth of enterprise infrastructure in your branch-office, campus, and data center networks
  • Prime 3.0 extends coverage to compute infrastructure management supporting inventory, fault, configuration and performance for UCS B-series blade and C-series rack servers integrated with Service Profile management.
  • Integration with the Enterprise SDN Controller (DNA Center), provides the ability to automate new device deployment using Zero Touch Provisioning capabilities (https based PnP agent) in the Cisco network devices.

Fig 1.1- Cisco Prime Infrastructure 3.0
The Cisco Prime Network Services Controller, previously the Cisco Virtual Network Management Center, offers centralized device and policy management for Cisco virtual services. The virtual appliance propositions transparent, scalable, and automation-centric management for virtualized enterprise data center and multitenant cloud environments.

With the help of the Cisco Prime you achieve a lot of things by integrating high-performance, reliable Domain Name System (DNS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and IP Address Management (IPAM) services for the enterprise network.

Cisco Prime is a GUI to manage all the reporting and stats that the network device generates. It will alert you if a device has a problem, you can check bandwidth/cpu/memory utilization, etc.

Cisco Prime Infrastructure can be deployed as Physical or Virtual appliance
For virtual appliance on VM, we need the below specifications shown in the table below

Fig 1.2- Cisco Prime Infrastructure Virtual appliance requirement

For Cisco Prime physical appliance, you can use Cisco UCS server with appropriate capabilities.

Cisco Prime infrastructure can support various devices such as Wireless controller, Access points, Wired devices such as catalyst switches, routers and so on. If here i can take an example of Cisco Prime infrastructure support number of devices, we have the following information
  • Maximum number of devices (combination of wired and wireless devices) with Express : 500
  • Maximum number of devices (combination of wired and wireless devices) with Express-Plus: 3000
  • Maximum number of devices (combination of wired and wireless devices) with standard : 10,000
  • Maximum number of devices (combination of wired and wireless devices) with professional: 14,000

With the help of Cisco Prime you can also manage Cisco Data center devices such as Cisco Nexus and Cisco UCS compute devices. 
  • Maximum number of Nexus devices with standard : 2500
  • Maximum number of Nexus devices with Professional : 3000

For Devices like Cisco UCS B-Series devices, Cisco UCS C-Series devices, with Standard and professional you can manage 2000 devices.