RFC 3139 (rfc3139) - Page 2 of 11

Requirements for Configuration Management of IP-based Networks

RFC 3139       Requirements for Configuration Management       June 2001


1.0 Introduction

1.1 Motivation, Scope and Goals of this document

   A number of IETF working groups have introduced new technologies
   which offer integrated and differentiated services.  To support these
   new technologies, working group members found that they had new
   requirements for configuration of these technologies. One of these
   new requirements was for the provisioning (configuration) of behavior
   at the network level.

   An example of this type of configuration would be instructing all
   routers in a network to provide 'gold' service to a particular set of
   customers.  Depending on the specific network equipment and
   definition of 'gold' service, this configuration request might
   translate to different configuration parameters on different vendors
   equipment and many individual configuration commands at the router.
   This higher level of configuration management has come to commonly be
   known as policy based management.

   Working groups associated with these new technologies believed that
   the existing SNMP based management framework, while adequate for
   fault, configuration management at the individual instance (e.g.,
   interface) level, performance and other management functions commonly
   associated with it, was not able to meet these new needs.  As a
   result they began working on new solutions and approaches.

   COPS [COPS] for RSVP [RSVP] provides routers with the opportunity to
   ask their Policy Server for an admit/reject decision for a particular
   RSVP session.  This model allows routers to outsource their resource
   allocation decisions to some other entity.  However, this model does
   not work with DiffServ [DSARCH] where there is no signalling
   protocol.  Therefore, the policies that affect resource allocation
   decisions must be provisioned to the routers.  It became evident that
   there was a need for coordinating both RSVP-based and DiffServ-based
   policies to provide end2end QoS.  Working groups began to extend and
   leverage approaches such as COPS for RSVP to support Diffserv
   policies.  This gave birth to COPS-PR [COPS-PR].

   These extensions caused concern that the IETF was about to develop a
   set of fragmented solutions which were locally optimized for specific
   technologies and not well integrated in the existing Internet
   Management Framework.  The concern prompted some of the Area
   Directors associated with the Operations and Management, Transport
   and General areas, and some IAB members to organize a two day meeting
   in mid September 1999.  The primary purpose of the meeting was to
   examine the requirements for configuration management and evaluate
   the COPS/PIB and SNMP/MIB approaches in light of these requirements.



Sanchez, et al.              Informational