Introduction to this Guide
Introduction
Pluribus Networks’ UNUM is a unified fabric management, automation and analytics platform that enables administrators to significantly reduce fabric deployment times, execute everyday fabric management life cycle tasks and conduct effective traffic analysis, all from the same graphical interface.
UNUM has two major components:
The first is the fabric management and automation component that comes with the base license. Administrators can perform network tasks such as creating VLANs, adding ports, monitoring fabric health, and many other standard functions. With this license, users can also save time by automating the provisioning of switches, creating fabrics, and building underlays.
The second component is Insight Analytics, a real-time analytics and performance management module that uses telemetry from the fabric nodes. With the Insight Analytics license, administrators can view traffic flow patterns, monitor fabric activity, or even analyze VMWare virtual machine traffic.
In this document, we will examine UNUM’s Day-0 automation capabilities concerning underlay fabric deployments. Our intended audience comprises system engineers and administrators with a basic understanding of data center networking who are interested in deploying fabrics in an open networking environment.
UNUM incorporates two forms of automation:
•ONIE Switch Provisioning – Also known as Zero Touch Provisioning or ZTP, UNUM provisions bare metal switches with a built-in DHCP server, installing the Pluribus Netvisor ONE operating system onto bare metal switches.
•Fabric Creation – UNUM automates the various steps of creating a spine/leaf fabric, leveraging a series of playbooks to meet customer design requirements. Today UNUM can create leaf/spine underlay fabrics using an Out-of-Band management network.
We’ll examine both of these topics with the intent of creating some examples of a fabric, familiarizing the reader with the steps necessary to create their own.