Cisco Nexus Dashboard is the next generation of the Application Services Engine and provides a common platform for deploying Cisco Data Center applications. These applications provide real time analytics, visibility, and assurance for policy and infrastructure.

This document describes the features, issues, and limitations for the Cisco Nexus Dashboard software.

For more information, see the “Related Content” section of this document.

Note: The documentation set for this product strives to use bias-free language. For the purposes of this documentation set, bias-free is defined as language that does not imply discrimination based on age, disability, gender, racial identity, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality. Exceptions may be present in the documentation due to language that is hardcoded in the user interfaces of the product software, language used based on RFP documentation, or language that is used by a referenced third-party product.

Date

Description

April 04, 2024

Additional known issue CSCwj44955.

September 19, 2023

Added support for CIMC 4.3(2.230207).

September 12, 2023

Additional open issue CSCwh23260.

July 8, 2023

Added support for CIMC 4.2(3e) for UCS-220-M5 (SE-NODE-G2) hardware. If your existing physical cluster nodes are using an earlier version, we recommend upgrading to 4.2(3b) or 4.2(3e).

June 26, 2023

Added support for CIMC 4.2(3e) for UCS-225-M6 (ND-NODE-L4) hardware. If your existing physical cluster nodes are using an earlier version, we recommend upgrading to 4.2(3b) or 4.2(3e).

April 28, 2023

Release 2.3(2d) became available.

April 18, 2023

Additional open issue CSCwe91228.

April 12, 2023

Release 2.3(2c) became available. This release provides process improvements for Nexus Dashboard hardware and services production and packaging, which do not affect user configurations or experience.

March 30, 2023

Updated the “Compatibility” section to remove restriction on UCS-225-M6 compatibility with NDFC.

The NDFC service is now supported on the UCS-225-M6 hardware.

March 26, 2023

Release 2.3(2b) became available.

New Software Features

There are no new features in this release.

Changes in Behavior

If you are installing or upgrading to this release, you must consider the following:

●     Before upgrading your existing Nexus Dashboard cluster to this release, you must disable all services running in the cluster.

If you have Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller service, you must keep it disabled until the cluster is upgraded to release 2.3(1) or 2.3(2) and the NDFC service is upgraded to release 12.1(2).

●     If you have Nexus Dashboard Insights service, you must upgrade to Nexus Dashboard release 2.3(2) before upgrading the Insights service to release 6.2(1).

●     If you have both Nexus Dashboard Insights and Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller in your environment but hosted in different Nexus Dashboard clusters, we recommend that you upgrade both clusters to Nexus Dashboard release 2.3(2), Insights service to release 6.2(1), and Fabric Controller service to release 12.1(2).

●     The default CIMC password for Nexus Dashboard physical nodes based on the UCS-225-M6 hardware is "Insieme123".

●     Beginning with release 2.2.1, service deployment profiles have been replaced with Network Scale settings.

Resource profile selection has been reduced to several more intuitive parameters directly related to your deployment use case. These parameters, such as number of switches or flows, describe the fabric size and use case intent and allow the cluster to intelligently determine the resources needed for the service. The parameters are categorized as "Network Scale" and must be provided prior to service deployment, as described in the Cisco Nexus Dashboard User Guide.

●     The primary cluster, which you use to establish multi-cluster connectivity, must be running the same or later release of Nexus Dashboard as all other clusters in the group.

In other words, you cannot connect a Nexus Dashboard cluster running release 2.3(2) from a primary cluster that is running release 2.2(1).

If you are upgrading multiple clusters that are connected together, you must upgrade the primary cluster first.

●     After upgrading to this release, we recommend upgrading all the services to their latest versions.

●     Nexus Dashboard platform downgrades are not supported.

Open Issues

This section lists the open issues. Click the bug ID to access the Bug Search Tool and see additional information about the issue. The "Exists In" column of the table specifies the releases in which the issue exists.

Bug ID

Description

Exists in

CSCwe91228

When upgrading from release 2.2.x to release 2.3.x with Nexus Dashboard Insights service deployed, you must keep the existing version of NDI during the entire upgrade process, including the service upgrade. The service must not be deleted after the Nexus Dashboard platform upgrade before the new version of the service is uploaded and enabled.

If you delete the old NDI version before the new version is installed and enabled, you may run into an issue where the new NDI version is not able to reserve the exclusive physical storage volume for the underlying two OpenSearch clusters.

2.3(2b) and 2.3(2c)

CSCvx93124

You see a message like:

[2021-04-13 13:48:20,170] ERROR Error while appending records to stats-6 in dir /data/services/kafka/data/0 (kafka.server.LogDirFailureChannel)

java.io.IOException: No space left on device

2.3(2b) and later

CSCwd48788

Error during local tar file upload for RHEL platform

2.3(2b) and later

CSCwe71125

If you restart multiple services at the same time, you may encounter a "Failed to enable service" error in the UI.

Additionally, you may see a "Cannot support required scale for this service on current Nexus Dashboard deployment. However, service can be started with limited capacity. Please check the documentation for more details". This error message doesn't reflect the real issue with the system, and the scale configuration may be still valid.

2.3(2b) and later

CSCwh23260

The pods in event manager namespace are crashing or are not in ready state

2.3(2b) and later

Resolved Issues

This section lists the resolved issues. Click the bug ID to access the Bug Search tool and see additional information about the issue. The "Fixed In" column of the table specifies whether the bug was resolved in the base release or a patch release.

Bug ID

Description

Fixed in

CSCwe19041

TLS 1.3 ciphers is not configurable. TLS1.3 ND offers all the three ciphers TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256, TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256

2.3(2b)

CSCwe21853

NDFC service fails to come up after a reboot or power cycle of at least two master nodes of the cluster.

2.3(2b)

CSCwe20667

Upgrade done via Firmware Management of Nexus Dashboard fails.

2.3(2b)

CSCwe91228

When upgrading from release 2.2.x to release 2.3.x with Nexus Dashboard Insights service deployed, you must keep the existing version of NDI during the entire upgrade process, including the service upgrade. The service must not be deleted after the Nexus Dashboard platform upgrade before the new version of the service is uploaded and enabled.

If you delete the old NDI version before the new version is installed and enabled, you may run into an issue where the new NDI version is not able to reserve the exclusive physical storage volume for the underlying two OpenSearch clusters.

2.3(2d)

Known Issues

This section lists known behaviors. Click the Bug ID to access the Bug Search Tool and see additional information about the issue.

Bug ID

Description

CSCvy62110

For Nexus Dashboard nodes connected to Catalyst switches packets are tagged with vlan0 even though no VLAN is specified. This causes no reachability over the data network. In this case, 'switchport voice vlan dot1p' command must be added to the switch interfaces where the nodes are connected.

CSCvw39822

On power cycle system lvm initialization may fail on due to a slowness in the disks.

CSCvw48448

Upgrade fails and cluster is in diverged state with one or more nodes on the target version.

CSCvw57953

When the system is being recovered with a clean reboot of all nodes, the admin login password will be reset to the day0 password that is entered during the bootstrap of the cluster.

CSCvw70476

When bringing up ND cluster first time, all three master nodes need to join Kafka cluster before any master node can be rebooted. Failing to do so, 2 node cluster doesn't become healthy as Kafka cluster requires 3 nodes to be in Kafka cluster first time.

CSCvx89368

After ND upgrade, there will be still pods belonging to the older version running on the cluster.

CSCvx98282

Pods in pending state for a long period upon restart. These pods are usually stateful sets that require specific node placement and capacity must be available on the specific node they are first scheduled. This happens when multiple applications are installed on the same ND cluster and the ND capacity overloaded.

CSCvu21304

Intersight device connector connects to the Intersight over the Cisco Application Services Engine Out-Of-Band Management.

CSCwe04619

The 'acs health' command may show a service as unhealthy and kubectl (available in the Tech Support collection) shows the service is in ContainerCreateError state.

CSCwd84875

Two Nodes RMA requires manual intervention.

CSCwb31373

After node failover, kubernetes scheduling may be unable to find appropriate resources for the pods in an app.

The symptom is that the app health will not converge and kubectl commands will show unhealthy pods.

CSCwj44955

There may be an issue during the bootstrap process on 3-node vND (ESX) clusters which can cause the 'acs health' command to show the following error:

'k8s: services not in desired state - aaamgr,cisco-intersightdc,eventmonitoring,infra-kafka,kafka,mongodb,sm,statscollect'

Compatibility

For Cisco Nexus Dashboard services compatibility information, see the Cisco Data Center Networking Applications Compatibility Matrix.

For Cisco Nexus Dashboard cluster sizing guidelines and the list of supported services for each cluster form factor, see the Nexus Dashboard Cluster Sizing tool.

Physical Nexus Dashboard nodes support Cisco UCS-220-M5 and UCS-225-M6 servers. For UCS-225-M6, you must be on release 2.3(2) or later.

Physical Nexus Dashboard nodes must be running a supported version of Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC). This release supports CIMC releases 4.2(3b), 4.2(3e), and 4.3(2.230207).

VMware vMotion is not supported for Nexus Dashboard nodes deployed in VMware ESX.

Cisco UCS-C220-M3 and earlier servers are not supported for Virtual Nexus Dashboard clusters.

Nexus Dashboard can be claimed in Intersight region 'us-east-1' only, 'eu-central-1' region is not supported.

Browser Compatibility

The Cisco Nexus Dashboard and services UI is intended to be compatible with the most recent desktop version of most common browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. In most cases, compatibility will extend one version behind their most recent release.

While not designed for compatibility with mobile devices, most mobile browsers are still able to render majority of Nexus Dashboard and services UI. However, using the above-listed browsers on a desktop or laptop is recommended. Mobile browsers aren’t officially supported by Cisco Nexus Dashboard and services.

Verified Scalability Limits

The following table lists the maximum verified scalability limits for the Nexus Dashboard platform.

Category

Scale

Nodes in a physical cluster

3 master nodes

4 worker nodes

2 standby nodes

Nodes in a virtual cluster (ESX), Profile 1

3 master nodes (ova-data)

3 worker nodes (ova-app)

2 standby nodes (ova-data)

Nodes in a virtual cluster (ESX), Profile 2

3 master nodes (ova-data)

6 worker nodes (ova-app)

Nodes in a virtual cluster (KVM)

3 master nodes

Nodes in a cloud cluster (AWS or Azure)

3 master nodes

Nodes in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

3 master nodes

Sites per cluster

Depends on the specific services deployed in the cluster:

●     For Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, see the Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Verified Scalability Guide for a specific release.

●     For Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, see the Verified Scalability Guide for Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller for a specific release.

●     For Nexus Dashboard Insights, see the Release Notes for a specific release.

Admin users

50

Operator users

1000

Service instances

4

API sessions

2000 for Nexus Dashboard and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator

100 for Nexus Dashboard Insights

Login domains

8

Clusters connected via multi-cluster connectivity for single pane of glass experience

4

Sites across all clusters within the same single pane of glass experience

12

Related Content

Document

Description

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Release Notes

Provides release information for the Cisco Nexus Dashboard product.

Nexus Dashboard Capacity Planning

Provides cluster sizing guidelines based on the type and number of services you plan to run in your Nexus Dashboard as well as the target fabrics' sizes.

Nexus Dashboard and Services Compatibility Matrix

Provides Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Services compatibility information for specific Cisco Nexus Dashboard, services, and fabric versions.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Hardware Setup Guide for UCS-C220-M5 Servers

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Hardware Setup Guide for UCS-C225-M6 Servers

Provides information on physical server specifications and installation.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Deployment Guide

Provides information on Cisco Nexus Dashboard software deployment.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

User Guide

Describes how to use Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Services APIs

API reference for the Nexus Dashboard and services.

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