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ExtremeCloud Orchestrator

Full Life Cycle Management and Network Visibility

Product Highlights

Highlights

Orchestrate better Business Outcomes

  • Provide greater visibility, drive real-time insights, and simplify network fabric operations with full-service network orchestration to enable business agility

Fabric Life Cycle Management

  • Simplify the deployment, provisioning, and management of network services with Extreme IP Fabric life cycle management

Visibility Management

  • Centralized management to deploy, operate, and monitor all Extreme visibility products at scale for 5G mobile network

Scalability for Small and Large Data Center Networks

  • Support for smaller network fabric design, or large 3-stage and 5-stage IP Fabric with EVPN-Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) deployed as the overlays

Improved User Experience

  • Industry leading graphical user interface (GUI) to deploy, provision, and manage Extreme IP Fabric and Extreme Visibility solutions

Ecosystem Integration

  • Provisioning of network fabric through API-driven automation to provide the network foundation for 5G cloud native infrastructure solution

ExtremeCloud Orchestrator (XCO) is an orchestration application that provides a unified and holistic graphical user interface (GUI) and application programming interface (API) for visibility management (visibility skill) and fabric-wide life cycle management (fabric skill) with a highly scalable and flexible deployment model for Extreme solutions. It provides the common infrastructure, as well as consistent installation and upgrade strategies for MLX, SLX, Extreme 8000 series, and 9920 devices. The user interface enables IP Fabric life cycle management of SLX, and Extreme 8000 series devices and visibility and policy management of MLX, SLX, and 9920 devices.

As organizations adapt to an unprecedented rate of change, IT teams are grappling with a lack of automation and integration between technologies, a lack of broad and deep visibility, widening skills shortages, and increasingly complex licensing. XCO addresses today's fast-paced and complex IT and mobile 5G network environments, in which organizations are increasingly turning to visibility and network automation solutions to improve network visibility, performance, and security. By providing a unified view and control of resources, network fabric and services, XCO enables a seamless user experience and improves network agility, scalability, and reliability while helping to reduce operational costs and errors.

Benefits

The Fabric skill consists of a bundle of microservices that execute the automation and orchestrating of an IP fabric.

The Visibility skill is based on another set of microservices and enables centralized management for all Extreme Networks visibility products.

The skills within XCO are designed to deliver a unified and integrated orchestration experience for organizations.

With this approach, organizations can easily and quickly deploy specific capabilities and can scale and evolve their orchestration capabilities as their needs change over time.

The XCO architecture is built on the concept of composable skills that can be activated and accessed at the workspace or orchestration layer. The workspace application provides the graphical presentation of either fabric or visibility skills. This application is designed to provide an intent-based interface to define outcomes across a network fabric, or visibility, and to represent service and solutions.

XCO simplifies the orchestration of complex networks by providing a unified view and control of resources, fabric network infrastructure, and visibility services to create a seamless user experience with a new unified graphical user interface (GUI) and application programming interfaces (API). Network orchestration improves network agility, scalability, and reliability while reducing operations costs and minimizing errors.

XCO serves as a platform and framework for delivering composable management components. It is based on a set of microservices and adheres to cloud-native design principles. It is composable by nature, enables life cycle management, visibility, and automates interactions between networks, devices, domains, applications, and systems with large network infrastructures. The architecture enables organizations to easily and quickly deploy specific capabilities they need and can scale and evolve orchestration capabilities as new and yet unknown use cases become available over time.

The Fabric skill dashboard manages the complete life cycle management of IP fabric networks, including:

  • Building and managing small data center fabrics and 3-stage and 5-stage IP Clos fabrics.
  • Managing networks for more granular control over who has access to which resources.
  • Integrating Virtual Management ecosystem platforms, such as VMware vCenter and Microsoft SCVMM.
  • Providing a single point of configuration for the entire fabric network, comprising the fabric(s) as well as an overview of system health and quick access to locations, devices, and users configuration pages.
  • Managing tenants and their provisioning parameters: tenant port-channels, tenant VRFs, their BGP peer groups, and BGP peers.

Extreme Visibility solutions help organizations to monitor, secure, analyze, and monetize their physical and virtual networks at scale. With a programmable hardware network packet broker, Extreme Networks delivers a best-in-class network visibility solution built for the most demanding networks.

With a one-time deployment of XCO, new network visibility nodes can be brought under management with minimal effort as the visibility infrastructure scales out. XCO also enables administrators to easily share rule configurations and transfer configuration ownerships among different groups within an organization.

The Visibility skill in XCO provides:

  • Centralized management of visibility products deployed network wide.
  • Supports the discovery and configuration of the Extreme 9920 visibility platform with associated 100/40Gb and 400Gb line cards, in addition to all existing Extreme Networks Network Packet Broker products (MLXe and SLX 9240).
  • A cloud-native API-first design to integrate with existing operational and business support systems.
  • An easy-to-learn yet powerful graphical user interface that simplifies management, provisioning, and maintenance vital for continuous service delivery at scale.

XCO supports the following deployment modes:

  • Fabric Mode (Fabric Skill)
  • Packet Broker Mode (Visibility Skill)

For the Fabric Skill, the deployment models supported include:

  • Server
  • Open Virtual appliance (OVA)
  • Third Party Virtual Machine (TPVM) residing on an SLX device

For the Visibility Skill, the deployment models supported include:

  • Server
  • Open Virtual appliance (OVA)

Note: For detailed information regarding supported TPVM versions, SLX-OS versions, and SLX devices, refer to the specific version of the ExtremeCloud Orchestrator Deployment Guide at: .