Installation Requirements

This chapter contains the following sections:

System Requirements

Review the system requirements before installing the Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.1 software:

  • Java—You must have the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.8, or the equivalent Java Development Kit (JDK) installed on your system. (The JRE is available at the Oracle website.)


    Note

    A 64-bit JRE/JDK is required.

  • Operating System—We recommend that your Cisco Prime Network Registrar machine run on the Windows or Linux operating systems as described in the Server Minimum Requirements table below. Cisco Prime Network Registrar requires a 64-bit operating system.

  • User Interface—Cisco Prime Network Registrar currently includes two user interfaces: a web UI and a CLI:

    • The web UI has been tested on Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 and Edge, Mozilla Firefox 69, and Google Chrome 77. Internet Explorer 8 is not supported.

    • The CLI runs in a Windows or Linux command window.


Tip

Include a network time service in your configuration to avoid time differences between the local and regional clusters. This method ensures that the aggregated data at the regional server appears consistently. The maximum allowable time drift between the regional and local clusters is five minutes. If the time skew exceeds five minutes, then the installation process will not be able to correctly register the server with the regional. In this case, unset and set the password on the regional cluster, and sync again.

Table 1. Cisco Prime Network Registrar Server Requirements
Component Operating System
Linux Windows

OS version1

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES/CentOS 6 and 7 64-bit2

Note: The newest level tested with this release is CentOS 7.9.

Windows Server 2012 R23

Minimum disk space

200 GB

For best performance, Cisco recommends use of SSD drives.

Minimum memory

16 GB

Minimum CPUs4

4 CPUs
1 Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.1 is only supported on 64-bit operating systems.
2 Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.1 has been tested by Cisco with Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 6 and 7, running standalone or on VMware (ESXi 6.x) on Cisco Unified Computing System (CUCS). You are not restricted from upgrading these systems as long as the OS and hypervisor changes are backward compatible. Cisco recommends testing the upgraded systems in a lab environment for the intended use cases before deploying to the production systems. Cisco warranty and service apply only to the Cisco Prime Network Registrar software, therefore does not apply to issues in OS, hypervisor, or third-party hardware. The newest levels of hypervisor tested with Cisco Prime Network Registrar are VMware ESXi 7.0 and Openstack Victoria.
3 Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.1 supports Windows Server 2012 R2, running standalone or on VMware (ESXi 6.x) on CUCS and other hardware supported by VMware.
4 Faster CPU and more memory typically result in higher peak performance.

Note

Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.1 is the last release to support Windows. Also, there will be no 9.x or 10.x releases (including patch or maintenance) for Windows, except for Severity 1 issues.


Note

Based on the type of clusters you are planning to deploy, see the Capacity and Performance Guidelines appendices for more details.


Important

Treat these system requirements as minimal guidelines. We advise you to monitor your deployment and adjust based on the actual usage level you are seeing.

Cisco Network Registrar has been tested against Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 7.3 and CentOS 7.3+. However, it is anticipated that the end users apply patches and maintenance releases to keep their OS upto date with OS-related bug fixes and security patches. Cisco does not anticipate that these patches/maintenance updates within the same OS major version will cause issues, but as always, it is highly recommended that any updates be lab tested before they are applied to production servers.

System Requirements for Linux OS

To install Cisco Prime Network Registrar on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS, the following x86_64 (64-bit) packages must be installed (over and above the Java Run-Time):

Table 2. Packages to Install

Package Name

Package Version

OpenLDAP

2.4

OpenSSL

1.0

libstdc++

4.x

libgcc

4.x

zlib

1.x

krb5-libs

1.x

The installer will report any packages that may be missing before beginning the installation process.


Note

To know the kind of Linux system you are on, use the following command:

more /etc/redhat-release

Recommendations

When Cisco Prime Network Registrar is deployed on virtual machines, review the following recommendations:

  • Do NOT deploy HA DNS or DHCP failover partners on the same physical server (in separate VMs). This will not provide high availability when the server goes down. Ideally, the high available/failover partners should be sufficiently "separate" that when one fails (because of a hardware, power, or networking failure), the other does not.
  • When deploying multiple Cisco Prime Network Registrar VMs on the same physical server (or servers served by a common set of disk resources), you should stagger the automatic nightly shadow backups (by default, they occur at 23:45 in the server's local time). To know how to alter this time, see the "Setting Automatic Backup Time" section in the Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.1 Administration Guide.

Note

It may be acceptable to not follow the above recommendations for lab environments; but they must be followed for production.

Installation Modes

The modes of installation that exist for the local and regional clusters are new installations and upgrades from a previous version. These installations or upgrades are performed by using operating system-specific software installation mechanisms:

  • Windows—InstallShield setup program

  • Linux—install_cnr script that uses Red Hat Package Manager

License Files

Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.1 license file contains two sets of licenses that cover the permanent and subscription parts of the license. The permanent licenses are similar to the licenses issued for 8.x and 9.x versions. For Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.1, the licensing is done according to the services that you require.

The perpetual portion of the license will continue to use the mappings established for Cisco Prime Network Registrar 8.3 and later.

Following are the types of licenses available:

  • base-system—Licenses the CCM services. This license is mandatory if you want to run Cisco Prime Network Registrar.

  • base-dhcp—Licenses DHCP/TFTP services and, optionally, an initial count of leases.

  • base-dns—Licenses the authoritative DNS services and, optionally, an initial count of RRs.

  • base-cdns—Licenses Caching DNS services and, optionally, an initial count of servers.

  • count-dhcp—Licenses an incremental number of active leases.

  • count-dns—Licenses an incremental number of RRs.

  • count-cdns—Licenses an incremental number of caching server instances.

A corresponding subscription license is issued for each permanent Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.x license. The expiration date for each subscription license is set to the subscription period. Following are the types of licenses available:

  • sub-system —Licenses the CCM services.

  • sub-dhcp—Licenses the DHCP services.

  • sub-count-dhcp—Licenses the authoritative DNS services.

  • sub-dns—Licenses the Caching DNS services.

  • sub-count-dns—Licenses an incremental number of active leases..

  • sub-cdns—Licenses an incremental number of RRs.

The different services provided by Cisco Prime Network Registrar are associated with the different license types as follows:

  • CCM services—base-system

  • DHCP services—base-dhcp and count-dhcp

  • Authoritative DNS services—base-dns and count-dns

  • Caching DNS services—base-cdns and count-cdns


Note

Licenses for Cisco Prime Network Registrar 9.x or earlier are not valid for Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.x. You should have a new license for Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.x. For the 10.x Regional, if one has 9.x CDNS clusters, the 9.x CDNS licenses must be added on the Regional server (9.x CDNS clusters will use 9.x licenses, and 10.x CDNS clusters will use 10.x licenses).


Note

You should not delete any of the individual licenses loaded from the file. If required, you may delete older versions of DNS and DHCP licenses after the upgrade. Older versions of CDNS licenses must be retained if the servers are not upgraded.


Note

Subscription licenses, if provided, should be installed to assure upgrades to future releases.

Note

You should have at least one base license for a server to enable that service.

License management is done from the regional cluster when Cisco Prime Network Registrar is installed. You must install the regional server first, and load all licenses in the regional server. When you install the local cluster, it registers with regional to obtain its license.

When you install the regional, you are prompted to provide the license file. You can store the license file in any location, provided the location and file are accessible during the installation.

The utilization of licenses are calculated by obtaining statistics from all the local clusters in the Cisco Prime Network Registrar system for all counted services (DHCP, DNS, and CDNS). The regional CCM server maintains the license utilization history for a predetermined time period.

Utilization is calculated for different services as:

  • DHCP services—Total number of "active" DHCP leases (including v4 and v6)

    Active leases include the number of leases in use by a client (and thus not available to another client) which also includes reservations and leases in transition.

  • Auth DNS services—Total number of DNS resource records (all RR types)

  • Caching DNS services—Total number of Caching DNS servers being run in the Cisco Prime Network Registrar system

The services on each local cluster will be restricted based on the services for which licenses are present.

When you configure DHCP failover, only simple failover is operational and supported (see the "Failover Scenarios" section in the "Configuring DHCP Failover" chapter in the Cisco Prime Network Registrar 10.1 DHCP User Guide).

To learn about obtaining the license files for Cisco Prime Network Registrar, see Obtaining Cisco Prime Network Registrar License Files.