Cisco Catalyst Center Global Manager Deployment Guide

Introduction

This document provides essential information for the successful deployment of the Cisco Catalyst Center Global Manager. It is designed for system administrators responsible for deploying the virtual appliance, connecting controllers, and provisioning access. Network administrators will find valuable insights into monitoring aggregated network details and controller health through a Single Pane of Glass (SPOG). The guide also serves users and operators managing enterprise-scale network infrastructure.

Key Features and Requirements

Cisco Catalyst Center Global Manager offers a unified view of all sites, inventories, and alerts from connected controllers, enhancing administrative efficiency. Key features include:

• Unified view of sites, inventories, and alerts.
• Enhanced administrative efficiency.
• Overview of network status changes, alerts, and visibility into site performance.
• Support for up to 25 controllers and 10 active users.
• Global search functionality for devices and clients.

The deployment requires specific system and virtual machine minimum requirements, including:

• VMware vSphere (ESXi and vCenter Server) 7.0.x or later.
• Intel Xeon Scalable or AMD EPYC Gen2 processors.
• 8 vCPUs with 16 GHz reservation.
• 100 GB + 550 GB HDD.
• 16 GB RAM.
• Specific I/O bandwidth and IOPS rates.
• Supported browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Deployment Considerations

Proper firewall configuration is crucial for enabling communication between the Catalyst Center Global Manager, controllers, and Cisco cloud services. Essential ports need to be opened for UI, REST, HTTPS management, shell access, and web UI installation. The guide details specific port requirements and recommended actions for each.

The document also outlines deployment requirements related to:

• Firewall access to ciscoconnectdna.com.
• Connectivity between the Global Manager and controllers.
• Network Time Protocol (NTP) synchronization.
• External authentication methods like TACACS+ and RADIUS.
• Assurance backups using NFS.

Security limitations such as Disaster Recovery (DR), FIPS, IPv6-only, and air-gapped configurations are also noted.