Summarized on September 30, 2026
The Cisco Plug and Play (PnP) portal is used to on-board Cisco SD-WAN products by linking Smart Accounts and Virtual Accounts to controller profiles [1]. After creating a Smart Account, customers can create Virtual Accounts that reflect their organizational departments, then associate licenses and devices with those departments. The Virtual Account should contain the device serial numbers that were added on the PnP portal, and once an overlay is created, the Controller Profile tab on the PnP portal shows the mapping of device serial numbers to their respective controllers [2].
For on-premises deployments, the customer or sales engineer must enter the SD-WAN Validator profile information into the PnP portal so that controller information can be passed to the PnP service [1]. The key steps to set up the SD-WAN Validator profile in PnP are:
- On the Controller Profiles tab, click Add Profile.
- Enter the controller type as SD-WAN Validator and click Next.
- Enter the Organization Name (as used in SD-WAN Manager) and the domain name or IP address of the SD-WAN Validator, then click Next.
- Review the displayed SD-WAN Validator information and click Submit, then Done.
Once the SD-WAN Validator profile is created, devices must be manually associated to it, and PnP will automatically push the SD-WAN Validator information, organization name, network ID, and associated serial numbers to PnP [1].
There are important rules governing edits to the SD-WAN Validator profile. The organization name cannot be edited if there are devices already associated to a SD-WAN Validator in PnP, and the network ID cannot be edited when devices are present in a Virtual Account. Only edits to the active controller profile will be reflected in the PnP provisioning tool.