The following list contains the pre-requisites of Cisco Optical Network Controller 3.1 installation.

• Before installing Cisco Optical Network Controller 3.1, you must first login in to the VMware customer center and download VMware vCenter server version 7.0, as well as vSphere server and client with version 7.0. Cisco Optical Network Controller 3.1 is deployed on rack or blade servers within vSphere.

• ESXi host must be installed on servers with vSphere version of 6.7.0 or 7.0 to support creating Virtual Machines (VM).

• Before the Cisco Optical Network Controller 3.1 installation, two networks are required to be created.

  • Control Plane Network:

    The control plane network helps in the internal communication between the deployed VMs within a cluster. If you are setting up a standalone system, this can refer to any private network. However, in case of a High Availability (HA) cluster, this network is created between the servers where each node of the HA cluster is being created.

  • VM Network or Northbound Network:

    The VM network is used for communication between the user and the cluster. It handles all the traffic to and from the VMs running on your ESXi hosts and this is your Public network through which the UI is hosted.

Note	For more details on VMware vSphere, see VMware vSphere.

The minimum requirement for Cisco Optical Network Controller 3.1 installation is given in the table below.

The requirements based on type of deployment are given in the table below.

Note	For a High Availability (HA) deployment, nodes on different ESXi hosts should have a minimum link bandwidth of 10G between them. This is recommended to ensure efficient data communication and synchronization between the nodes.

To create the control plane and virtual management networks follow the steps listed below.

1. From the vSphere client select the Datacenter where you want to add the ESXi host.

2. After adding the ESXi host create the Control Plane and VM Networks before deploying the SA or HA. The HA has four IPs where one is the primary and the others can join as secondary and tertiary IP addresses. The SA has only one IP. Also, in the case of HA the Virtual IP is the IP that exposes the active node to the user.

For accessing SSH, ed25519 key is required. The ed25519 key is different from the RSA key.

Use the CLI given below to generate the ed25519 key.

ssh-keygen -t ed25519
Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/xyz/.ssh/id_ed25519): ./<file-name-of-your-key>.pem
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in ./<file-name-of-your-key>.pem
Your public key has been saved in ./<file-name-of-your-key>.pem.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:zGW6aGn8rxvEq82sA/97jOaHrl9rnoTaYi+TqU3MeRU xyz@abc
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ED25519 256]--+
|                 |
|                 |
|          E      |
|       + + .     |
|        S .      |
|    .+ = =       |
|     o@o*+o      |
|     =XX++=o     |
|    .o*#/X=      |
+----[SHA256]-----+

#Once created you can cat the file with .pub extension for the public key. ( ex: <file-name-of-your-key>.pem.pub )

cat <file-name-of-your-key>.pem.pub
#The above key has to be used in the deployment template ( SSH Public Key ) in the Deployment process