Managing Resources Overview
Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC) resources comprise of images, flavors, tenants, volumes, networks, and subnetworks. These resources are the ones that ESC requests to provision a Virtual Network Function. These resources makeup the basic building blocks of a VNF service request, for example, Image is a bootable file system that can be used to launch VM instances. To manage these resources, you need to create the corresponding resources in ESC. These resource definitions exist or are created on OpenStack or VMware vCenter based on the provisioned infrastructure.
Depending upon the type of VNF deployment, you must ensure that the necessary resource definitions are available either on OpenStack or VMware vCenter. When you deploy VNFs on OpenStack you can either create these resource definitions in ESC or you have the option to use out-of-band image and flavor definitions that are already available on OpenStack. An out-of-band resource is a pre-existing resource. This resource is either created by ESC itself or by another source. For multiple VIM deployment, ESC uses out-of-band resources. ESC supports multiple VIM connectors for multi VIM deployments. The VIM connectors connect ESC to more than one VIM if configured.
ESC uses proxy server (if available) to reach OpenStack.
When you deploy VNFs on VMware vCenter, you can either use the out-of-band images that are already available on VMware vCenter, or create an image using the ESC portal, or using REST APIs. For more information on creating images using the ESC portal, see Managing Images. The deployment data model refers to these images to deploy VNFs.
![]() Note |
The procedure to create the resource definitions varies on OpenStack and VMware vCenter. The resource (image, deployment and so on) names created from ESC must be globally unique. |
The following table lists the different environments and the list of resource definitions that must be made available before VNF deployment:
Resource Definitions |
OpenStack |
VMware vCenter |
---|---|---|
Tenants |
Creating and deleting tenant definitions is done in one of the following ways:
|
Not applicable. |
Networks |
Creating and deleting network definitions is done in one of the following ways:
|
Creating and deleting distributed port group definitions is done in one of the following ways:
|
Subnets |
Creating and deleting subnet definitions is done in one of the following ways:
|
Not applicable. |
Flavors |
You can either use out-of-band flavor definitions that are already available in OpenStack or create flavor definitions in one of the following ways:
|
Not applicable. |
Images |
You can either use out-of-band image definitions that are already available on OpenStack or create image definitions in one of the following ways:
|
You can either use out-of-band image definitions that are already available on VMware vCenter or create image definitions in one of the following ways:
|
Volumes |
You can use out-of-band volumes that are already available on OpenStack. For more information, see Managing Volumes. |
Not applicable. |
The table below lists the OpenStack and VMware versions ESC supports.
VIM |
Version |
---|---|
OpenStack |
|
VMware |
ESC supports VMware vCenter version 6.5, 6.7, 7.0. |
For information on Installing ESC, see the Cisco Elastic Services Controller Install and Upgrade Guide.