In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn how to install and configure the Cisco Nexus Dashboard in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. This guide includes instructions on how to deploy a virtual Nexus Dashboard (vND) cluster into AWS, build the Nexus Dashboard cluster, and validate that it is successfully up and running. It also covers how to increase AWS Elastic IP quotas, create necessary AWS policies, and subscribe to the Nexus Dashboard in the AWS console. The guide is intended for those with basic knowledge of AWS and networking, and it assumes that the reader has an AWS account and a laptop with SSH capability and a web browser.
What You’ll Learn
- How to deploy a vND cluster into AWS
- How to build the Nexus Dashboard cluster
- How to validate that your cluster is successfully up and running
What You’ll Need
- An AWS account. There will be charges; we are deploying an enterprise-ready Cisco Nexus Dashboard.
- You will need to increase your AWS Elastic IP quotas. You need a minimum of six free Elastic IPs to deploy Nexus Dashboard into AWS.
- A laptop with SSH capability and a web browser.
Some Tips to Remember
- Whenever you navigate the AWS console, you can always use the search functionality to quickly navigate between the different objects that need to be created.
- Navigate to the AWS Quotas console by searching for “quotas” in the AWS console.
- Click under Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2):
- Search for Elastic IPs. Click the quota name EC2-VPC Elastic IPs:
- Find Recent quota increase requests and click to begin the process of increasing your Elastic IPs:
- Input however many IP numbers you need. Remember that for vND deployment, you need a minimum of six.
- Navigate to VPC and create a VPC in an AWS region of your choice. Create a private CIDR of /16 to /24 in the VPC.
Be sure to choose a subnet that is /24 or /16, which is the CIDR size that the Nexus Dashboard CloudFormation template expects.
- Create an IGW and associate it with the VPC you created:
- Create a route table and associate it with the VPC. Add the default route 0/0, pointing to the IGW you created:
You can add a name to the route table now to make it more easily identifiable later.
- Create a key pair in the AWS console by navigating to the EC2 console and finding the Key Pairs menu on the left navigation pane. Click Create key pair; name the key pair and choose the format for your SSH session.
You can also create a key pair and upload it if you have your own key on your machine.
- Navigate to the following URL: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-agdixxd5lgi6q
- You can also search Google for “AWS Marketplace Nexus Dashboard” if this URL changes.
- Once you are at the Nexus Dashboard AWS Marketplace page, as shown below, navigate to the Continue to Subscribe button and click through the subscription GUI.
- Now, click the Continue to Configuration button:
- Once you are in the CloudFormation configuration wizard, as shown below, select your desired software version and the needed AWS region:
- Click to continue to launch the CloudFormation template:
- Once in the CloudFormation configuration screen, you can simply use the default options. Go ahead and scroll to the bottom to screen and click Next:
- Choose the AWS objects that we created in the previous steps. These include:
- Stack name
- VPC
- Subnet CIDR
- Availability Zones
- Number of Availability Zones
- Instance size
- Cluster password
- AWS SSH key pair
- Subnet control access (which subnet can access the cluster; 0.0.0.0/0 is easiest, but you could be specific)
Simply scroll to the bottom of the page; there is nothing to configure here. Click through to continue:
Again, scroll to the bottom of the page; there is nothing to configure here. Click through to continue:
Review the options you inputted. If it looks good, go ahead and scroll down to the bottom of the page and submit the stack.
- Once the stack has been submitted, you can watch the deployment progress on the screen:
- Upon completion, you should see something similar to the following in your AWS console:
- Navigate to the EC2 console and find the ND1 of your new Nexus Dashboard cluster:
- Use your browser to navigate to the public IP and log in to ND1. Use your password that you inputted during the CloudFormation configurations.
- When Nexus Dashboard is located in the cloud, it is likely that you won’t have a need for proxy configurations. YOU MUST DISABLE PROXY by hovering over the “i” icon and then clicking the Skip button. Once in the GUI, input the following:
- Cluster name
- NTP server:
pool.ntp.org - DNS server:
8.8.8.8 - Note that you must click the check marks to submit your inputs.
- Let’s begin to configure the individual nodes. Starting on ND1, the information is already populated, so all you need to configure is the ND1 node name. You will see the Next button is greyed out until we have configured at least one node. Once you input the ND1 node name, you then add another node.
- In order to add the other ND node, you need to gather its assigned IP address from the VPC CIDR of 100.0.0.0/24 that we had created previously. This IP is going to be used to validate the node in order to join the cluster. It will always be the lower of the two IP addresses.
Copy the IP address and then validate the node in the Nexus Dashboard GUI. Be sure to provide ND2 with a node name and add the node.
Now you can do the same procedure for ND3:
- Navigate to the AWS EC2 console to first find the ND3 instance and its associated IP in the VPC.
- Add the ND3 node, using the IP found in the AWS console.
- Provide ND3 with a node name.
Under Cluster and Nodes, review the configurations. If everything looks good, go ahead and click Configure. There will be one more final confirmation screen; go ahead and click through it if you are ready to go. The cluster-forming process can take 30 to 40 minutes. You can watch it proceed, or you can get some coffee :).
- To SSH to the cluster, find the public IP for any Nexus Dashboard node and use your key pair that you created for the Dashboard cluster. Be sure to change the permission on your key pair file.
aleccham@ALECCHAM-M-6D7G Downloads % chmod 0400 vnd-keypair.pem
aleccham@ALECCHAM-M-6D7G Downloads % ssh -o HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -i vnd-keypair.pem rescue-user@3.232.141.23
rescue-user@ND1:~$
- Once in the cluster, you can check health and cluster information with the following commands:
rescue-user@ND1:~$ acs health
All components are healthy
rescue-user@ND1:~$
rescue-user@ND1:~$ acs show cluster
┌─────────────┬─────────┬────────────────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────────┬───────────────┐
│ NAME │ VERSION │ DNS │ # OF NODES │ SERVICE NETWORK │ APP NETWORK │
├─────────────┼─────────┼────────────────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────────┼───────────────┤
│ vnd-cluster │ 2.2.2d │ vnd-cluster.case.local │ Masters: 3 │ 100.80.0.0/16 │ 172.17.0.1/16 │
│ │ │ │ Workers: 0 │ ::/0 │ ::/0 │
│ │ │ │ Standbys: 0 │ │ │
└─────────────┴─────────┴────────────────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────────┴───────────────┘
rescue-user@ND1:~$ acs show masters
┌────────────────────┬────────────────┬──────────┬─────────┬────────────────────┬────────────────────┬─────────┐
│ NAME (*=SELF) │ SERIAL │ VERSION │ ROLE │ DATANETWORK │ MGMTNETWORK │ STATUS │
├────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────┼─────────┼────────────────────┼────────────────────┼─────────┤
│ *ND1 │ E7DA2421F043 │ 2.2.2d │ Master │ 100.0.0.75/28 │ 100.0.0.8/28 │ Active │
│ │ │ │ │ ::/0 │ ::/0 │ │
│ ------------------ │ -------------- │ -------- │ ------- │ ------------------ │ ------------------ │ ------- │
│ ND2 │ F0733E4DB1C2 │ 2.2.2d │ Master │ 100.0.0.91/28 │ 100.0.0.24/28 │ Active │
│ │ │ │ │ ::/0 │ ::/0 │ │
│ ------------------ │ -------------- │ -------- │ ------- │ ------------------ │ ------------------ │ ------- │
│ ND3 │ 9901242F2F41 │ 2.2.2d │ Master │ 100.0.0.100/28 │ 100.0.0.39/28 │ Active │
│ │ │ │ │ ::/0 │ ::/0 │ │
└────────────────────┴────────────────┴──────────┴─────────┴────────────────────┴────────────────────┴─────────┘
rescue-user@ND1:~$ acs system-config
schemaVersion: "1.0"
firmwareVersion: 2.2.2d
firmwareUpgradeTime: ""
nodeUUID: b97f64b2-b844-4774-8bcd-f258747cd3c5
nodeSerialNumber: E7DA2421F043
nodeName: ND1
nodeDNSDomain: vnd-cluster.case.local
nodeType: Virtual
nodePlatformType: AWS
nodeRole: Master
model: SE-VIRTUAL-APP
oobNetwork:
name: ""
subnet: 100.0.0.8/28
subnetv6: ""
interface: bond1br
uplinks:
- mgmt0
- mgmt1
bond: bond1
vlan: ""
bridge: bond1br
gatewayIP: 100.0.0.1
ifaceIP: 100.0.0.8
vlanID: ""
iface: bond1
vip: ""
external: ""
inbandNetwork:
name: ""
subnet: 100.0.0.75/28
subnetv6: ""
interface: bond0br
uplinks:
- fabric0
- fabric1
bond: bond0
vlan: ""
bridge: bond0br
gatewayIP: 100.0.0.65
ifaceIP: 100.0.0.75
vlanID: ""
iface: ""
vip: ""
external: ""
dataNetwork0:
name: ""
subnet: ""
subnetv6: ""
interface: ""
uplinks: []
bond: ""
vlan: ""
bridge: ""
vlanID: ""
iface: ""
vip: ""
external: ""
dataNetwork1:
name: ""
subnet: ""
subnetv6: ""
interface: ""
uplinks: []
bond: ""
vlan: ""
bridge: ""
vlanID: ""
iface: ""
vip: ""
external: ""
appNetwork:
name: ""
subnet: 172.17.0.1/16
subnetv6: ""
interface: app-vnic
uplinks: []
bond: app-vnic
vlan: ""
bridge: ""
ifaceIP: 172.17.0.1
vlanID: ""
iface: ""
vip: ""
external: ""
serviceNetwork:
name: ""
subnet: 100.80.0.0/16
subnetv6: ""
interface: ""
uplinks: []
bond: ""
vlan: ""
bridge: ""
ifaceIP: 100.80.0.0
vlanID: ""
iface: ""
vip: ""
external: ""
clusterType: ""
clusterName: vnd-cluster
clusterUUID: 766e642d-636c-7573-7465-720000000000
clusterNumMasters: 3
clusterVersion: 2.2.2d
seedList:
- ipAddress: 100.0.0.91
ipv6Address: ""
serialNumber: F0733E4DB1C2
name: ND2
- ipAddress: 100.0.0.100
ipv6Address: ""
serialNumber: 9901242F2F41
name: ND3
workerList: []
standbyList: []
ntpServers:
- pool.ntp.org
nameServers:
- 8.8.8.8
searchDomains: []
mode: standalone
firstMaster: true
containerRuntime: docker
timezone: ""
rescue-user@ND1:~$
Congratulations! Your Nexus Dashboard cluster is now running in AWS. You can now begin to add sites or to install the Cisco Nexus Dashboard application onto the cluster. By following the step-by-step instructions, you have successfully deployed a vND cluster, built and validated the cluster, increased AWS Elastic IP quotas, created necessary AWS policies, and subscribed to the Cisco Nexus Dashboard in the AWS console.