User guide

6-2 Network Infrastructure Manager User Guide
Managing Providers
The Infrastructure Provider
The infrastructure provider entry is a special one. This provider entry is used to manage
the user accounts for NIM, controlling access to the ISM Provision server from the NIM
client. For this reason, the infrastructure provider cannot be deleted. When you login to
NIM, there is a read-only entry of “infrastructure” for the Provider field in the login
screen.
Device Access
When a provider is created, all of the devices, ports, VLAN tags, and IP addresses
currently available in ISM Provision are available to that provider.
When a provider account user in the IP Service Manager client creates a subscriber in
IPSM, that user actually creates a VLAN in the device configuration. Creating an IP
aggregation point creates a super-VLAN. Creating a service bundle creates a Qos profile
and creating a policy based service creates an access list.
You may wish to limit provider access to particular devices, ports, VLAN tags, and IP
addresses. If there are no devices displayed for the provider, that provider has access to
all devices. However, once you specify access to a device, the provider now only has
access to the resources that you have specified. When the IPSM client is in use by one of
the provider’s accounts, only the specified resources are available. If a user tries to
create subscribers that use ports, VLAN tags, or IP addresses outside of the allowable
range, an error will be generated during the verification step, and the subscriber will
not be created until the error is corrected.
Managing Providers
To add a provider to ISM Provision, you will create the provider and any additional
accounts in the Providers Administration view in NIM. To make the provider and
accounts available, you must commit these changes to the ISM Provision server.
Create a Provider and Provider Accounts
To create the provider and provider accounts, use the Providers Administration view in
NIM. From here you can launch the Create Provider wizard.