Skylight orchestrator 20.05 Release Notes

Overview

Accedian is pleased to announce release 20.05 of Skylight orchestrator.

The following topics are covered in this document:

• Upgrade Paths
  Details the supported upgrade paths for this release.

• New Features
  Covers the new features introduced in this release.

• Deployment Considerations
  Covers general limitations of the current release and any upcoming changes to product availability and support.

• Skylight orchestrator 20.05 Lifecycle
  Lists the planned lifecycle dates of this software release. Includes table with milestones.

For more information, see the Skylight orchestrator Features/User Material section.

Accedian Technology Support

These release notes apply to the following Accedian products:

The following table lists key functionality of Accedian Skylight sensor elements, sensor control, modules, SFP compute and classic actuators supported by Skylight orchestrator 20.05.

Supported in Skylight orchestrator Version 20.05

Functionality	AT	TE	GE	10 GE	GT/GX	LT/LX	Modules	SFP Compute	Sensor control	FS & FS10G	FSX	Classic Actuator
Device Management
Device Commissioning
Y.1564/RFC2544
Metrics Collection
Alarms
Inventory
Performance Session Management

* CLI step support

Upgrade Paths

The upgrade to version 20.05 requires that you are running a system with one of these software versions:

• Skylight orchestrator 19.12
• Skylight orchestrator 20.02

Skylight orchestrator 19.12 was the last release to be supported on hardware appliances. As a result, upgrades are supported on virtual appliances only.

Detailed procedures for upgrading to this release are provided in the Skylight orchestrator 20.05 Upgrade Manual.

For customers running Skylight Director or Skylight orchestrator software on hardware appliances, a rehoming procedure is available that allows the transfer of the software and its configuration to a new virtual appliance.

Detailed procedures for rehoming on a virtual appliance are provided in the Installation/Deployment subcategory titled Virtual Appliance Rehoming.

Skylight orchestrator uses feature keys to enable certain menus and features. When upgrading to a new version, you must install new feature keys.

New Features

Skylight sensor: control SFP Compute 10G Introduction

The 20.05 release of Skylight sensor: control introduced support for the SFP Compute 10G.

This module will support the following functionalities:

• Discovery via Inventory feature.
• Support for all remote module steps: FW Upgrade, CFM, DMM Reflector, Flowmeter, TWAMP reflector, VCE, Loopback configuration and performance module step.
• Inventory functions for SOAM, interfaces, ports and VCEs.
• SAT tests for both SAT initiation and reflection (L2 and L3 loopback functions).
• VC agent functions for objects supported on the module.
• Module ports for reflection in performance sessions.
• Module VCEs are available as source interfaces and/or target interfaces for performance sessions.

Skylight element LX Introduction

The LX is a 4 port 10G device that is modelled on the LT. Skylight orchestrator 20.05 can support the LX and support the following functionalities:

Discovery Features

• Addition of LX to the system via manual or REST API based operations
• Discovery via inventory node
• Using the LX as an inventory node
• Support for both ipv4 and ipv6 management addresses

Alarms

• Support alarm query and reception via SNMP to provide a current alarm list in both the GUI and the REST API
• Support for northbound alarm forwarding of alarms

Inventory features

• Inventory of ports, interfaces, SFPs, LLDP neighbours, regulators, filters (L2, L3 v4 and v6, Vid sets), PAA, Policies, SOAM (MA, MEG, MEP, DMM, SLM, PL), TWAMP sessions

Commissioning

• Support the same commissioning steps as the LT
• Support for backup / restore operations
• Support or firmware upgrade operations (both step and via immediate upgrade functions)

Service Performance

• Allow LX ports to be used for both SAT generation and SAT reflection endpoints
• Provide LX port and interface inventory in SAT creation process (for both 2544 and 1564 tests)

Collection

• Enable configuration of vcagent on LX along with the session type
• Support for VC agent in LX max configuration

Sensor Control LLDP Inventory

SFP Compute and Module LLDP neighbors are now reported in Skylight orchestrator, which allows Skylight operators to retrieve LLDP neighbor information using Skylight orchestrator or Skylight sensor: control.

LLDP functions have been enhanced to provide the following:

• Introduce an LLDP inventory function in the Inventory App for Skylight elements.
• LLDP will be retrieved from sensor controls inventory at least once a day, or if the sensor: control undergoes a resync operation.

LLDP inventory will display the same fields as NID inventory with the following changes:

• Module serial is part of the columns and is searchable/sortable.
• The field "Local Port" has been changed to "Local Port Name" for consistency.

New inventory is now available via Web services, GUI and scheduled exports.

Inventory Panel Branding Changes

All references to VCX in the managed objects section on the Inventory page have been changed to Sensor control.

Deployment Considerations

Hypervisor Guidelines

Skylight orchestrator has been testing against KVM and VMware hypervisors. The following guidelines should be used when deploying to these environments:

• The engineering guidelines of the product must be respected. The product ships with a minimal configuration that in most cases needs to be adjusted to meet the requirements stated in “Deployment Profiles” section of the Administration Guide. Failure to respect these engineering settings can lead to application downtime and possible data loss.
• The product was designed assuming MAC addresses and UUIDs assigned on installation of the virtual appliance will persist for the lifetime of the virtual appliance. Licensing functions are tied to these identifiers and unexpected behavior can occur if they are changed. This is especially important when installing the virtual appliance in a cluster. These assignments must be static.
• When using hypervisor functions that involve dynamic load balancing of guest virtual appliances in a hypervisor cluster (i.e. VMware DRS), the balancing policy should limit rebalancing operations to be done on virtual appliance startup and/or hypervisor host failures.

Device Interoperability

The following section details the firmware releases that are known to interoperate with this release of Skylight orchestrator. Please refer to the Skylight orchestrator Administration Guide for a listing of supported functions for each firmware version.

Support for sensor element software releases 4.7.x, 5.4.x and 5.5.x is deprecated. Plans should be put in place to upgrade your performance elements to more recent versions.

For the releases mentioned below, support for maintenance releases is also included.

ESXi Support

Skylight orchestrator release 20.05 will not support ESXi hypervisors running release 5.5 and 6.0. Systems running ESXi 6.5 can be upgraded to release 20.05.

HTTP Interface

The HTTP interface of Skylight orchestrator is no longer supported for GUI operations. HTTP operations are still supported for the REST and XML APIs, but web service clients are urged to switch to the more secure HTTPS protocol.

Customers using browsers with HTTP protocol on port 6080 will automatically be redirected to HTTPS protocol on the same port (6080). This means no firewall changes are required as part of this change.

Disk Sizing for New Installations

The default image size for Skylight orchestrator is now 150 GiB. This image is large enough to support small networks of under 100 network elements and 1,000 performance sessions. For larger networks, the disk size of the image must be increased. This can be achieved via VMware and KVM management tools.

Example disk sizing:

• For 5,000 elements and 20,000 performance sessions: 370 GiB is recommended
• For 52,000 performance sessions: 430 GiB is recommended

Please consult the Skylight orchestrator Administration Guide for sizing guidelines and the Skylight orchestrator User Guide for procedures on how to increase the disk size.

Hot Standby and Classic Actuators

The hot standby functionality cannot be used in a network that is composed of only Classic Actuators. In order to properly detect and handle “split brain” conditions, the hot standby functionality requires at least one Skylight performance element or Skylight sensor: control in its list of managed elements. If you wish to use the hot standby function and only have Classic Actuators in your network, please plan on deploying at least one Skylight sensor: control or Skylight performance element in your network.

IPv4 Addresses for Hot Standby

The hot standby feature requires the use of IPv4 addresses for its configuration. For planning purposes, it should also be noted that hot standby configuration requires three (3) distinct subnets for the management, data replication, and heartbeat functions.

IPv6 addresses can be used in addition to these IPv4 interfaces for connectivity to the application interfaces (web and REST APIs) and performance elements being managed. IPv4 addresses are only required strictly for the hot standby functions.

If you wish to make use of this feature, please contact your Solution Engineering representative to initiate network planning activities.

XML Interface Deprecated

The XML interface is deprecated and will be phased out in future releases. It is still available in this release, but northbound systems are urged to migrate to the CSV file format for PM data reception.

Manager Module Interoperability

Conflicts will arise if both Manager Module and Skylight orchestrator are configured to manage the same Skylight sensor: control. Skylight orchestrator will effectively take over all management of the performance sessions for the Skylight sensor: control, and leave the Manager Module with un-acquired supervision endpoint.

Using this release to add Manager Modules as managed elements is not recommended.

Manager API

The performance session management calls defined at the /nbapi REST endpoint were introduced in SDV 1.6 to duplicate the calls present in the Skylight Director Manager Module. This endpoint was preserved in a backwards compatible fashion to allow REST API clients of the Manager Module to seamlessly switch to the Skylight orchestrator.

This endpoint is to be considered capped. Any new features pertaining to performance session management will be implemented using the /nbapiemswsweb REST endpoint in future releases.

CLI Additions and Changes

The CLI command set of the appliance monitor interface was enhanced to duplicate the mgr-commands that are present in the SkyLIGHT Director Manager module.

These commands were preserved in a backwards compatible fashion to allow customers familiar with the Manager Module command set to migrate to the Skylight orchestrator.

This command set is to be considered capped; no new features will be developed on the CLI functionality.

Performance Session Feature Activation

Skylight Performance Session functionality requires to be activated via a Feature Key. This key is available at no additional charge. Please contact Accedian TAC to have this key added to your Accedian customer portal profile.

Performance Session Licensing

Skylight Performance sessions are licensed objects. In order to configure such sessions, Skylight orchestrator must be configured to access a License Server. Accedian recommends using Skylight orchestrator License Server release 1.6.0.1.

Licensing alarms have been added for the following scenarios:

• License Server connectivity loss
• Raised when connectivity checks to the SDLS are unsuccessful

• License about to expire
• Raised seven days before license expiration

• License Exceeded condition
• Raised when more sessions are configured than what is available on the license server

Please refer to the Skylight orchestrator User Guide for instructions on configuring connectivity to a license server.

Browser Support Limitations

The minimum recommended screen resolution to operate Skylight orchestrator is 1360 x 768. Lower resolutions will not provide an optimal experience.

Performing a zoom on your display is not recommended due to incompatible implementations with browsers. If a zoom must be applied, please use a Firefox browser as it has the most standard support for this function.

Due to issues with browser compatibility mode and web sockets, Internet Explorer is no longer supported. Please use Google Chrome (version 70 or higher) or Firefox (version 50 or higher) to access the Skylight orchestrator web interface.

For Windows users, it is also recommended to leave the scale and layout option of the Display settings at a value of 100%.

Restoring Virtual Appliance Configuration Backups

Configuration backups of the virtual appliance (done via the configuration export command) are not portable from release to release. That is to say, a configuration backup from a 1.6 system should not be used to restore a 19.12 system. Unexpected behavior may occur.

Please ensure that configuration backups are restored on systems running the same release from which the backup was taken.

Metrics Collection CSV Filename Timestamp

In Skylight Director Manager Module, the timestamp contained in the filename of the CSV files produced by the CSV generation feature indicates the timestamp of the most recent performance metric contained within the file.

In order to align with the CSV filename convention of all other Accedian products (Skylight sensor: control and Skylight performance elements), this naming strategy is changed in Skylight orchestrator. The timestamp in the CSV filename represents the time when the file was created.

Please note that in all cases, the timestamps of the metrics themselves (present within the content of the file) represent the time of when the metric was produced. Only the timestamp contained in the CSV filename is impacted by this change.

Vision Collect Streaming Limitations on 6.4.1.2 and 6.4.2

When using release firmware 6.4.1.2 with Vision Collect, a disconnection from Skylight orchestrator may incur data loss. The data retention periods are not respected and data loss can occur after a few seconds of disconnection.

When using firmware release 6.4.2 in Skylight performance elements in high resolution mode with packet loss greater than 10% of the management network, some reporting periods may be lost. Please ensure a reliable management network is in place.

These issues are corrected in Skylight performance element firmware releases 6.4.3 and higher.

The First Result Records for a New Session Are Skipped by CSV Export

When the CSV producer detects a new performance session, it marks its data for extract from the first time it views the session. If the CSV producer is configured to run every five (5) minutes, this can mean that the first five minutes of result data for a new session will not be exported.

This is expected behavior; all performance data after this initial detection phase will be captured by the CSV producer.

Skylight orchestrator 20.05 Lifecycle

This section lists the planned lifecycle dates of this software release. See the table below outlining the following milestones: