Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO) provides consistent network and policy orchestration, scalability, and disaster recovery across multiple data centers through a single pane of glass while allowing the data center to go wherever the data is. NDO allows you to interconnect separate Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) sites, Cisco Cloud ACI sites, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC) sites, each managed by its own controller (APIC cluster, NDFC cluster, or Cloud APIC instances in a public cloud). The on-premises sites (ACI or NDFC) can be extended to different public clouds for hybrid-cloud deployments while cloud-first installations can be extended to multi-cloud deployments without on-premises sites. In addition, NDO can be deployed as a service in Cisco Nexus Dashboard.
For Cisco ACI, NDO is the intersite policy manager. It provides single-pane management, enabling you to monitor the health-score state of all interconnected sites. It also allows you to define, in a centralized place, all intersite policies, which can then be pushed to different APIC domains for rendering them on the physical switches in those fabrics. This provides a high degree of control over when and where to deploy the policies, which in turn allows the tenant change domain separation that uniquely characterizes the Cisco Multi-Site architecture. With NDO, you can extend your policies to any site or multiple public clouds.
For Cisco NDFC, NDO enables network policy consistency and disaster recovery across multiple NDFC fabrics around the world through a single pane of glass and scale-out NDFC leaf switches to thousands of switches managed using one centralized policy.
Figure 7-5 shows the Cisco Nexus Dashboard overview.
Figure 7-5 Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Overview
Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator Features and Benefits
Following are the key features and benefits of Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator –
Single pane of glass for administration and orchestration of multiple networking fabrics for both Cisco ACI and NDFC
Automation of the configuration and management of intersite network interconnects across an IP backbone for both Cisco ACI and NDFC
Consistent multitenant policy across multiple sites, which allows IP mobility, disaster recovery, and active/active use cases for data centers
Capability to map tenants, applications, and associated networks to specific availability domains within the Cisco Multi-Site architecture for both Cisco ACI and NDFC
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud orchestration supporting on-premises Cisco ACI sites and public cloud sites (AWS and Azure)
Capability to have multi-cloud ACI deployments without on-premises sites
Scale out sites and leaf switches based on resource growth
