Converting Legacy Configuration into Policy and Configuration Groups

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our expert insight series on converting legacy configuration SD WAN configuration into policy and configuration groups.00:10Today the presenters are Roger Millis and Metsuff, and we are accompanied by our support panelists Anestasia and Michael. Quick word about me. I am in Cisco for almost 13 years now and I've been around doing networking from last 16 plus years. I've had.00:19The chance to work.00:39In in intact for almost eight years I've been working in the traditional WAN routing space smart services, platform architecture, and finally landed up into. I have had a few technical papers published on cisco.com and I'm a Cisco live speaker as well.00:40Roger is also a veteran in Cisco, but he's also a very active Cisco live speaker and an expert in catalyst SD WAN. So before we move forward with the the session, I would appreciate if.01:00You can join the Slido or you just need to scan this QR and the passcode is SD WAN EIS. And once you're there, we just have to have few questions just to understand the kind of audience we have here today.01:17So I'll just here for 30 more seconds and, then we will get to the question So I'm still waiting for people.01:35Join.01:56Okay, you are aware but have not looked into it, ok? What about the others?01:58So the majority is kind of like either are not aware or are aware of UX two.zero but not have looked into it in more detail. So today's session will actually give you a good idea from where you can start.02:33Looking into UX two.zero. We have covered a lot of details on on UX two.zero in our previous installments of expert insight series and we highly recommend you to go through those through those sessions. We will share the link in just few slides. So we highly recommend that you.02:52To take some time out to go and look into those sessions to understand what UX two.zero is, what value it adds.03:11But what we are also trying to look from, from today's perspective, today's session is how you can actually, you know, make yourself more ready in terms of adopting UX two.zero. Right, so thanks thanks for this. So.03:19Have you used the SD WAN conversion tool before? Because that's what we are going to look into more detail today and yeah so it's more of the conversion tool we've not used.03:36Okay, so the thing is, that's the whole idea that we want to show you that there is a very powerful tool for converting your legacy SD WAN configuration into the newer ways of doing your SD WAN configuration that is.03:56UX two.zero and we will look into.04:16The high level workflow, and then we will straight away dive into the details of your conversion tool that what functionality it brings up, what are different ways that you can utilize that tool and what are the the workflows that you need to follow, and each of these sections will have their own respective tables.04:19At any point in time you have any questions, feel free to put them in the Q and A section of the Webex and our panelists and Michelle will will answer and address those questions. So this is the link that we were talking about, that.04:38What we are not covering in this session today is what UX two.zero is. So what are the advantages and how to use UX two.zero? We've covered that in length and breadth in our previous sessions and this is the link where you can actually go and look.04:57Through those sessions, it's not only talking about UX two.zero but a lot of other great sessions by our SD WAN experts, right? So this is a great repository for you to revisit if you have not already and reach out to us if you have any, any follow up questions whatsoever.05:12So in terms of the high level workflow, Roger, if you can quickly thanks itself. Yeah so like I said, what we're gonna be covering today is just the conversion tool because it kind of merits having a session also itself.05:31However, we thought we'd include this, this kind of end to end workflow on how you might want to migrate to config groups. This is the only time in the session that we'll be looking at stuff outside the conversion tool, yeah?05:51But it is worth seeing how the conversion tool fits into the wider picture, right? So the workflow I've kind of segmented it here into plan, prepare and implement. Most of what we're gonna be looking at is within the prepare section today, yeah? But, just, just so you guys have.06:04An idea of the journey of the steps you might want to take. This is what we generally recommend. So we'll start, we'll start at the top, top left plan. 1st step would be to define the order, the order of the sites, then we're gonna move to configuration groups. Now what I'd recommend personally from experience.06:20This is assess so you stack all of your site types by risk level, sorry cause we had a question down at the bottom. Assess all of these site types by risk level, what that typically means for me is the services that are running at those sites and the number of users at those sites, right? So sites with less services, less.06:40Users typically have less risk. So that's with more services, more users typically have more risk, right? That's the least true for a corporate environment.07:00And we're gonna we're just gonna move up through the risk rating. So we'll start with those smaller sites with less services and move up to the bigger sites as we, as we go through the conversion. Second step will be to define the timeline that's fairly self explanatory, right? We want to define when the project's gonna start milestones and when it's gonna end if everything's successful. And then the 3rd step.07:08Second most or 1st most important step here is to define the rollback plan. You're probably already aware that the actual configuration push mechanism has a rollback mechanism built into it, right? So, a lot of the work's already done for you there. However, we'll we'll cover that the the kind of extra things that you can do in a couple of steps time, right?07:29Moving on to prepare, the topic of today's session is use the conversion tool. There's two ways that you can use that. We'll cover them both and you can see it end to end. We'll go through some live examples, yeah? Review the output. Very, very important step, ok? We'll see when we look at the conversion tool.07:49See up in the top left it says beta. That's very important, ok? The conversion tool is not.08:08Always gonna be a hundred percent accurate in the conversions that it makes. We'll see a couple of examples in my demo a little bit later on. Yeah. And then the 3rd step of prepare is on your templates, download the variable CSV, right? If you do need to.08:15If at some point you do need to reattach the template to a device, it saves a lot of flapping when it comes to putting in the, the variables into that form, right? If we've already got it downloaded as a CSV. So that kind of links back to the rollback plan that I was talking about. Now moving on to implement, we're not gonna I'm not gonna talk about this too much because it's kind of beyond the scope.08:32Of of this session but pre change tests we should always be doing pre change tests. If you don't have a plan in place, I'd personally recommend the Sastra tool where you can generate a huge report that just contains the entire state of the device.08:51And we can do that before and after and compare the diff, yeah? Next one is to detach the template. Now what that's gonna do is that's gonna unlike the configuration on the device. So it won't actually change the configuration on the device. It just means that the manager is not matching it anymore. We're gonna assign the config group to the device.09:03That's what that's not actually gonna push any changes at that point, ok? It's just going to logically associate the configuration with that device and then we're gonna deploy it. Now when we come to deploy, we're gonna get that final step where we can compare the diff and we'll see kind of red and green entries.09:23In the GUI, if anything's been added or removed, if everything goes perfectly with this, we will still see some changes because the way that the config group manages the device, it adds some stuff up at the top of the configuration, yeah? And then finally post change tests again if you don't have a plan for that, I'd recommend sasstra.09:41But run a comprehensive report after and just see if anything's changed, and then assess success based on your own metrics.10:01Then we can move on answer. Makes sense. Thanks. Thanks for that Roger. So looking into the core functionality and scope of what this tool does, it's, basically, you know, the requirement from the field was to have a tool that can assist the customers to migrate.10:09From the classic ways of configuring your SD WAN devices or implementing policies within your SD WAN fabric and convert them into the newer ways of configuring your devices and creating policies within your SD WAN.10:29Network. That is configuration groups, policy groups, topologies, right? So we should have a mechanism so that we can easily move or transition from classic ways of doing things to the newer ways of doing things. So the the requirement came in from the field and we came up with this tool that can.10:44Assist us in making this transition you know a lot less intrusive. So what it does, it converts your templates and policies into configuration groups, policy groups, and topologies, right? Because we know that the.11:02So.11:22From from the from the classic ways of doing your policies because we know templates gets into configuration groups, right? Policy, it could be a data policy and app route policy, a debt or or a or a centralized control policy that has to be converted into.11:23Policy groups or topology. So data policy and approach policy would be a part of your policy group. Your control policy would be a part of your topology.11:43Right, and we will see that in the demo. So this tool converts whatever is 1st of all attached as a template to a device, it would attach it or it would convert into a configuration group and whichever policy is activated, you can have ten policies, but we know that only one.11:52Centralized policy would be active at one point in time. You can only convert that active policy into policy group/topology, right? So it actually collects all these details, all these data points from SD WAN manager. There are different ways how you can collect templates and policies from SD WAN manager.12:11And.12:31Push it to the tool and then it converts the templates into config groups, the policies, into policy groups and topologies, and it also takes care of the variable transfers that in within your templates you have any variables that you have defined. It will also take care of transitioning.12:32Your variables from templates to configuration groups. What it does not do is convert features that lack configuration group or policy group equivalent, right? So there could be few things that are not one on one converted from your classic templates into configuration groups, but it's it will not.12:52Leave the user into, you know, where we are not aware of what was converted and what was not because the tool will.13:12Give a notification that these are the sections that are not converted and even you can, you know generate a report in terms of what was generated, what was not so that you have a log and you have to revisit them when you are actually attaching your.13:23Devices to the configuration groups, right? So as as Roger mentioned, so this isn't beta, this tool isn't beta, so you still need to take care of making sure that whatever you are attaching to your or to your network devices.13:40The configuration is correct, something important is not being missed. That notion of doing a preview and doing a side by side conflict diff, check, you always have to do it. Never skip that, even though you are pretty sure that the configuration is right, always do a side by side.13:57Config diff check so that you know what is being added, modified or deleted, right? So, from the attribute perspective that which version do we say that this configuration tool would be supported? So ideally from twenty.twelve.14:14You can use this particular tool to convert your templates to UX two.zero templates or policies to UX two.zero, but you might already know that what we suggest that if you are migrating or targeting to migrate to UX two.zero, your target release should be 2015 or.14:312018, right? Status is beta, device compatibility is the device agnostic in terms of the fact that you know that let's say the templates that you are creating, those templates are device specific. But then the configuration groups, it's not device specific. But the thing is.14:50When you will convert your templates which are device specific to configuration groups, you will have those device specific templates into configuration groups, right? So it would not give you one configuration group for all different kinds of devices.15:10It will not do that. It will do a kind of a one on one conversion, right? So you need to take that thing also into, into account. Impact on edge devices just by converting, there would be NO impact because as we said that just by conversion it would just give you the base config.15:27The configuration that it just converted from your classic templates to to to configuration groups or policies, but then it's up to the user to verify that the configuration is complete and then move on with the steps to.15:47Start attaching those device to the respective configuration groups. From the version perspective, as I said from twenty.twelve, but the the the recommended is 2015 or even 2018. From the firewall perspective, there are different modes and we'll touch upon that aspect in just a few minutes, but you need to make sure that.15:59That the traffic from this particular IP address or towards your SD WAN manager is open.16:19Right, and there are the, how can you access this particular tool? You need to go to the Cisco SD WAN portal, previously known as the SSP portal, and we will see how you can access and what are different ways that you can start.16:25Utilizing the tool. All right? So there are two workflows that are a part of this conversion tool. So one is an offline method, the other one is an online method. Offline method is ideal for air gap environments, where you've got restrictions in terms of reaching to the internet and this.16:40Attribute that I just mentioned here, this does not apply for offline method. You don't need to open any specific firewall ports for your tool to go and talk to the manager. Why? Because you are going to do the activity of conversion manually.17:00Without, you know, giving the access to the tool towards the SD WAN manager. The activities is manual and what are the steps involved? It's, they're very straightforward. What you need to do is to just export the, the, the JSON that would comprise of templates and policies.17:19From the SD WAN manager, upload it manually to the conversion tool. Once it has done the magic, download the file from the conversion tool, come back to the SD WAN manager, upload it and you will have the, the, the, the configuration group, policy groups or topologies as whatever the case is.17:37Ready for you to, you know, start acting upon it. Online method requires internet reachability from your SD WAN portal towards the SD WAN manager, and in this case, the firewall rule allowing that particular IP address comes into picture. As one would expect, in this case, there is NO manual intervention.17:58As such, you just need to do few clicks and the the portal or the tool, the conversion tool will directly fetch the templates and policies from the SD WAN manager and convert them into configuration groups, policy groups, and topologies, right? So I will show you the offline method that how it looks.18:17Like and what are the steps involved and what all things you can do, and Roger will take care of the online method.18:37So getting into more details of what offline method is, so this is the link for your SD WAN portal, right? So you go here and, on the bottom left, you will just see that in the demo. On the bottom left, you will see the tab for configuration conversion tool. You click on it.18:46And you'll have two options here to select the flow, either connect to the SD WAN manager. So this is the online method and the other one is upload templates exported from SD WAN manager. This is the offline method. So this is what we are going to look at right now. So as I said, user must export the configuration from the SD WAN manager, upload it to the portal, right?19:05Here.19:25And then the attached templates and active policies get converted. So keep this in mind that only the attached templates and active policies from your SD WAN manager will get converted into respective configuration groups, policy groups, and topologies. Once it is done, you just need to export the compressed file, upload it back to the SD WAN manager.19:26Here, the respective config groups, policy groups, topologies would be available in your SD WAN manager.19:46They would not be deployed or associated with any device, as I said, it is a 1st step as we went through that workflow, as Roger mentioned. We have to make sure that the, the, the conversion has happened as we like. If there is anything missing, we need to correct and add.19:52Only and only when we are fully confident of the fact that the configuration is good enough, the policies are good enough, we can, you know, start attaching them or making them active filling your SD WAN fabric. And as I said, we can also generate the reports, if there is any feature that was.20:10Not converted or if there was any failed conversion, we can also look at the logs and look at the report that what did not went good.20:30So, here is a small pre recorded demo because it's kind of like, just few steps, but once this is done I will just quickly, you know, hop onto a live SD WAN manager to show you a few more steps that I think would be interesting. So here what we are doing, we are on SD.20:39Manager 2018 to one version.20:58And I'm just showing you here the device state, so currently my hub and spoke topology is activated, so you can see in this case CH twelve acts as hub. 1013 20, and 50 are spokes and they only have one transport, so you've got only one BFD activated.21:01CH Ten has two transports and there are two bfds activated and CH twelve has five bfds because it's a hub, right? So, a regular generic hub and spoke topology is activated. And this is via classic policy, ok? So.21:20Looking at the templates, I'll show you the, the, the, the policy as well. Looking at the templates right now, so there is a branch template, and I think there is, is anybody having like, is everybody able to hear me loud and clear?21:40I can. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Yeah, so there is this template, NO device template, NO named as branch and it has five devices attached to it, right? So if you look into those devices, so it's CH 20 CH 13, and then few on staging.21:58So when this branch template would be converted, it would be into a branch configuration group. We will see that. Now looking at the policy, so the policy name is complete, this is the name of the policy, hub and spoke data policy and AAR.22:16And this policy is currently activated. True, right? So this policy would also be converted into policy group and topology. Why? Because it has data policy, approach policy, and also.22:32Hub and spoke topology. So now hub and spoke policy is the control policy that gets converted into topology. So as you can see here, on hub, we are applying a data policy on spokes, we are applying a control policy for hub and spoke and an app route policy on VPN ten.22:47Right, so we will see that how this looks like after getting converted. So once we've done the the prechecks in terms of what's the current state, what we need to do is.23:07To go to templates, configuration templates and click on configuration conversion. So for your templates, for your policies to be converted, you will have to come to templates, right? So here itself, when you would export the file.23:23It would add or it would have the policies also a part of that file, right? So you don't necessarily need to go to, in fact, there's NO option for you to go to the the classic policies and export them into a file that you need to convert. So you just need to, you know, from the template perspective, you just need to, you know.23:41Come up here, click configuration conversion and it would add the templates and the policies. Mind you again, only the templates.24:01In which the device are attached and activated and only the policies that are activated. One more thing to to notice, if you see here, vsmart is also attached to a template. Configuration groups does not support vsmart or the controllers today.24:10So this will not get converted. So the would continue to work as managed by our template, right? So this will not get converted. So once you have the export the the template JSON ready, all you need to do is to come back to the.24:25SD WAN portal and right here is the conversion configuration conversion tool. You click on it. Since you're doing offline method, you click on upload template exported from SD WAN manager. Select the file from your machine.24:44Which was this named template. It would upload right here, you click next. And now you see here the name is a branch because the name of your template was branch and it has five devices attached and the device type is C18 thousand V.25:00If there are few other devices, you will see those here as well. So now looking into what the configuration or the other feature templates were, they are now getting converted into feature profiles, configuration groups, policy groups, topology groups, and the group of interest.25:17Right, so this, these are nothing but part of UX two.zero.25:37So you can have a look here. What was the name of the policy group that was converted? It's nothing but complete hub because you remember the name of the policy was complete. So it has now created two policy groups, one as for hub, the other one for the spoke.25:43Okay, instead of having one policy group since within the policy group you just cannot have you know the workflow is different from a classic policy where after creating your or your let's say control policy, data policy approved policy, you need to at the end.26:00Attach that policy to a particular site, right? And within one policy itself, you will have all these policies and I'm talking of a classic policy, right? So all within one big policy you will have at the end where you would apply the policy, right? It could be on few branches, you have a data policy.26:16Be on on hub and spoke policy, but then on some other you have you know another data policy. But again.26:35The the the the rule of saying that one policy type per direction per VPN, it cannot overlap with another policy type, right? So that particular rule is active, is applicable within 2X2.zero as well. So those rules do not change.26:43So the whole idea is that in within the UX two.zero, within policy groups, you have now two policy groups, one for your hub, one for your spoke. And why did that happen? Why? Because hub had different policy with it and spokes had different set of policies with it.27:00Now there is also a topology group. Why? Because we had hub and spoke policy created. Now hub and spoke is a control policy, that control policy that gets converted into topology group. So that also is naming complete. Okay, and here are the group.27:16Group of interest, these are the lists from the.27:36Legacy configuration perspective. You can also look into the report and if you want to download that report, you can also do that. So all you need to now do is click export and download the, the converted file. That name would be something called as export. Come back to the SD WAN manager.27:40And go to configuration groups and here you have an option of, you know, importing that particular file, which the we just converted from your conversion tool. You click here, you will see that.27:59The configurations are now well converted, ok? Has been successful and now if you would go to your configuration groups, you will see.28:17A configuration group named branch but NO devices attached. In fact, what I can do now is pause here and from here I'll just quickly show you the, the, the live we manage where you see this branch, we are just moving from a pre recorded demo to a live.28:37Demo right now because I want to show you few things also that here you see this branch.28:58Configuration group, it's not attached or added here to any of the device. Now from here you can start renaming if you want to, if you want to change the description, if you want to, you know, change any, any other configuration, so it already created the system profile, the transport and management profile service profile based on.29:04What you had from the template, it created that, but it did not add it any other device to this particular configuration group.29:24So if we go to the templates, we see right here branch and these were the devices that were added, site 20 and 30. They are still added and still managed by branch template, Nothing from the configuration group.29:32From the policy perspective, what I would like to show you, and I think that would be interesting if you look in the policy. So the data policy right here is Amazon, any source should take local MPLS lock and then there is any traffic should go to an app VPN, so this one data.29:48Policy.30:08There is one app route policy right here, and then there is one control policy. And if you look at the application, so data policy is right here, applied on hub, and on spokes you had control policy and one app route policy. Now let's 1st look into what your control policy looks like now. So the control policy was on spoke.30:09So that got converted into topology. So the name is right here as complete hub spoke data here. Why? Because the policy here, the classic policy right here, if you go and edit, it took the description from this policy.30:28So it right now, it doesn't serve this purpose in terms of the description. This is not now, you know, having data policy or approach policy, so you can always come back here and edit as you, as you like.30:46Okay, so here you can see that these are the spokes that it's already attached and this is the hub, right? So hub and spoke policy is already activated for VPN ten. So that part is ok. But now if you look into the policy group.31:02You see two policies created here. One for hub, the other one for spoke. Hub had this application priority complete hub. It just took the name complete from the classic policy. You go to the app priority policy here, and if you look into the complete hub.31:18High priority. It is nothing but the traffic data as you remember. So it was for Amazon and it's selecting MPLS to go out and then there is was this policy to have it right here for your approach policy for that was activated on spokes, so you have.31:353rd application priority that's complete_spoke.31:55You come here and this one is right here where you got an approach policy. So your spokes had one approach policy and control policy, control policy got converted to topology, approach policy is sitting right here with your Google traffic being recorded. So now it's up to you to, you know, verify that everything is ok. Once it is ok now.31:58So the thing is you need to apply this policy to this is spokes, you need to associate to your spokes. We are not going through this workflow by because we've already have, you know, been through this in our previous sessions but just need to select your spokes. This one is up, so we are not selecting it here.32:18You just apply it here and for your hub policy that had the the data policy in it, so you just need to go here, associate a device, select your hub.32:37Next, that's it. Now, if you are observing here the fact that you can have these two different policies activated on different sites. Unlike your policies, your classic policies, if there are multiple policies right here, you can only activate any.32:53Only one policy at one point in time. But now with UX two.zero policy groups, if they are not overlapping in terms of the site ID, direction VPN, you can apply or activate these policies on different devices as your use case maybe. Okay, so.33:08This is about the, the, the, the offline method of converting your classic templates policies into policy groups and topology. Let me see if I, yeah. So what I've done is.33:27Just give me 1 s. Just trying to ok yeah so this was more about the demo, right? I've added few snapshots here, so I'm not going to go through these again because I've already shown you.33:44You but just for your reference, you will have the recording and the PDF, so you will have these snapshots in those PDFs as well, so I'm not spending time here. And I think that's pretty much from my side. Over to you Roger. I think you need to share your screen so i'll stop sharing from my side.34:04Yeah, sorry. 1 s. I've just come up with that permissions thing so I need to drop and, rejoin again, sorry about this. Yeah, sure, NO problem. Let me in fact let me try without dropping.34:23Okay. I'm very sorry about this. I'll be back in 30 s, ok? No problem. In the meantime, let me see if we have any any questions that you want me to probably show it online by the time Roger comes back?34:41There was a question if you can make a change during the conversion, things like name or those type of stuff. So if you can change it during the conversion or if you need to wait till the conversion is finished or if there is a possibility to change it in the JSON.35:03Yes yes, so that's a that's an interesting one. So there is a possibility to change in JSON. You can do that, but what we would recommend is keep it as is and let the conversion happen, import it on your manager so that you can compare one on one that what you had in templates and now what you have in config groups.35:21Right, but if you change the source within your JSON, what you put as a source as an input, that would be as your output. So it's doable, but we recommend that. Keep it as is and then change it later. So once you have your configuration groups, policy groups, topologies ready, you can, as, as you saw, right, the descriptions were not making sense.35:41Because it took it from as is from the classic policy, right? So I have to go and change the description, but I could always change it in the JSON and you know take it from there, do you.36:01Yeah I think we're good right, very sorry about that everyone.36:21Okay perfect. Yeah, so I'm alright to take over this up, yeah? Sure, thanks. Alright, yeah, so thanks for thanks for covering that. It was, that was pretty comprehensive. So what we're gonna do now is just discuss the online method.36:25And cover any, any kind of corner cases that weren't covered in the the offline method, right? So similar similar kind of slides to what was presented. However, there are some quite significant differences when we're when we're doing the conversion tools. So, again, this is gonna go through sSP.cisco.com, what we like to call.36:45The self service portal, the SSP itself will be connecting to your view manage for this, ok? So a couple of prerequisites, as you can see on the screenshot, you need to allow incoming connections, and you also need the cloud services enabled on your SD WAN manager.37:05Once we've met those prerequisites, basically the same process is gonna happen. However, the conversion tool is gonna automate most of it for us, ok? Up to the point of actually, you know, pushing the, the new the new configuration groups and policy groups back into SD WAN manager.37:22Right, we're still not gonna attach them. We're still not sorry I should say we're still not gonna associate them, still not gonna deploy them, anything like that, but this is this is a very hands off mechanism to get to the same point that I've got to with the on offline method, ok?37:41So we're gonna start with the demo and again this is pre recorded video, just a little bit easier cause we can speed things up basically. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is and I'm gonna be drawing attention to some things a little bit different to what I served your attention to, but we won't we won't cover everything again don't worry. Okay, but.37:59Next thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go to configuration groups and I'm gonna confirm that there's NO configuration groups there, ok?38:19Then we're gonna go to templates. If there are configuration groups there, by the way, that's totally fine. If you've already built something yourself, you can still convert and don't worry about that. This is just, you know, proving that we're gonna make the conversion, ok? Now as pointed out.38:27The conversion tool will only convert templates that are currently applied to devices, ok? So we'll see at the bottom, there's bottom three entries in the table. We've got large branch edge DC edge, and branch edge. Each of those is attached to at least one device if you move your eyes over to the devices attached column. Okay, we've got six templates in total.38:42So the top three are the controller, the manager or the, the vsmart and the V manage, and another router template, ok?39:01The manager and the controller template are ineligible at the moment and that second row down edge basic, that's a router template, that's not gonna be converted because if you take a look at the devices attached column, it's not attached to anything, ok? So the convi the conversion tool's gonna see all of this, but it's it's not gonna act on those top three.39:10Okay. All right, what we're gonna do from here is we're gonna go to the conversion tool itself. We're going to leave it on the default of connect to SD WAN manager. So I've already opened the firewall for this particular IP address in this instance, and we'll see here we need four pieces of information for the.39:30Tool to be able to make that connection, right? We need the URL or the IP address, we need an admin username and password, and we need the port if it's a non standard port. Yeah? What we're gonna see now is just a little animation as it makes the connection, if that's successful, we'll move on to the next screen.39:51Okay, so we can see here that on the next screen we've only got one option, right? And that is to collect all of your templates and policies, right? So we'll hit collect and this is where we used to pre recorded video. This process took about 1 min.40:11On my V manage, ok? If you have a lot of templates and a lot of policies with a lot of policy objects, this, this could take a few minutes, ok? So I've spread that up to about 4 s, but it did take about a minute in real life. Okay, and then we had a little pop up saying success, so NO worries there.40:30Hit next and we'll see here that those three templates that we looked at, and we'll look at them again just to just to confirm, only the three templates that have got devices attached actually appearing here. Yeah.40:48Okay, that was a deliberate decision by the BU to I guess focuses on, on what's actually being used. I know a lot of, a lot of you out there have a lot of templates. Many of which are not being used, ok? So this might perhaps be a chance to consolidate some of those down.41:03So we'll hit convert and the actual conversion process itself is very quick as we can see and we get an output of everything that's been converted. I think is this, point to note is though we get two columns in the table, in the dropdown, right? We get the name and then we get the status. Some of these may show as partial.41:19Some of them may show as failed, ok? We're wanna take a bit more of a detailed look at some of those options in just a second. Okay, so within features, I think features has some.41:38But what we can do is we can go to the report in the top right, generate PDF or adjacent. We're just gonna look at it as the PDF. In this instance, we'll see here that some of these things actually either partially converted or didn't convert, ok? And I'll explain what each one is, but just be aware that this, this may well happen because of the way things that are configured.41:49In config groups and policy groups versus templates and policies, right? So the 1st one was a QoS map that will need to be rebuilt in the the policy group section. 2nd one was a firewall rule. Again, that would need to be rebuilt. And then the 3rd one down at the bottom under unsupported items, my.42:09Deployment here was actually running the the security stack, so if you're not aware, if you want to run like the IPS URL filter, anything that's not the next gen firewall, what you actually need to do is deploy a container called the UTD container unified threat defense.42:30Within, templates, when we deploy that, we, we also configure a resource profile so CPU and memory allocations for that container. We don't do that in config groups, right? It's all done for us automatically. So that just straight up didn't get converted because we don't need it, ok?42:48So just be aware of that, there are some bits and bobs that we need to clean up after afterwards typically, ok? And then we just look at the the groups of interest there as well, right? So, once we've verified everything remember, a very important step, right? We want to make sure that as much of this gets converted as possible and that we're aware of what doesn't get.43:06Get converted. We're gonna hit upload and and this is just replacing the the kind of the download and the upload that, right? So we hit confirm there.43:26It's not gonna make any changes on any routers, and just for transparency I have spread this bit up as well. This bit took about a minute online. Similar to the download.43:34What we're gonna see when this does finish is that some of the things didn't get uploaded and the reason for that is because they were part of that QoS map, that, that didn't get fully converted, right? So they're all in there and you can you can like jump into the details if you want.43:51The only other thing on this screen is the rollback, ok? Rollbacks an interesting way for this. All it's gonna do is it's just gonna delete the configuration groups and the policy groups that you've just added, right? So if for some reason you decide that you made a terrible mistake, you can hit rollback and it will just delete them. It's exactly the same as going in and deleting yourself, right? No.44:12No change has been made on any router at this point.44:32Yeah, and then the final step is just to verify that each of those has been uploaded as we can see here. All right, so I've kind of called this out as well, but because of the device agnostic nature of these configuration groups, you may find.44:35You've got more configuration groups than you need at the end of it, right? One solid example is a customer I work with has small sites, some of the small sites have ISR 1100s, some of the other small sites have ISR four ks. But they will do the same thing, right? So.44:55In that instance, we'd still end up with two configuration groups for the small site, but it may not actually be necessary to maintain two configuration groups for the small site going forwards. Yeah. So there's definitely a consolidation process that can happen after this. Okay, so, just to recap that is as you've seen this is quite.45:12A bit easier than what showed us, right? We go to the SSP.45:32With the vmanage, then we can make a connection to. We put in the details that we need. It pulls in all the configuration and policy group and policies, shows us what we're gonna convert and all of this is literally just a click through. It doesn't require any input from us. Once we've done the conversion.45:36Then we can check anything that didn't succeed.45:56And then we load the convert the converting configuration and we can see anything that didn't didn't get uploaded to the. Okay and that's that's the end of the conversion tool section and the the online method, right? So as you can see, fairly simple conceptually.46:00And the online method just automates a download and an upload and then a download and an upload for you. So looking forwards in this series, we've got a couple more coming up in June. The next one being.46:19Migrating from templates to configuration groups and then quick follow up with migrating from policies to policy groups, right? And that's, that's probably gonna address a lot of the questions that you have out of this, right? Like I mentioned, we're only really focusing on the tool itself in this session. So if this did look interesting, I'd strongly recomme.46:37When that you attend the next two sessions as well over the next few weeks.46:56And you can register those, we'll send the link out as well. Okay, so we've got a few final questions for everybody on the call. If you wouldn't mind rejoining the Slido just so we can kind of gauge.47:01And how we did here and where your interests like for future sessions. Roger, quick, quick thing before we move forward. So there's one question that says that clause do not see a manual conversion button in the template, so most likely it would something be related to the.47:16The user profile in terms of what user group you are a part of. So ideally I mean you should have the conflict conversion button inside the templates, but if not, it would probably be looking something like I don't know.47:35There is NO nothing mentioned there, right? Just what we saw in the demos that there is this config conversion tab. If you do not see it there, then it's most likely related to the point that that particular user with which you've logged in does not have the the privileges to.47:50You know, convert your templates to conflict groups or, you know export the templates out in a JSON. So if you could revisit your user settings, you would know that doesn't have those privileges. Yeah, thank you.48:06Correct yeah it sounds like a an RBAC issue. Was that the only question? I guess so ok yeah if everybody could just.48:22Rejoin the Slido if you you close the tab on your browser, just a quick one, if everybody could just give us aa1 to five of how you'd rate today's session, that'd be much appreciated.48:40I'll give this like five more seconds ok and then we got a couple more questions, oh thanks for posting there. Couple more questions just looking forward.49:20So, 1st one, do you use automation for your SD WAN deployment and operations?49:41Interesting.50:04Okay, five more seconds ok second to last one, I promise, how would you rate your organization's interest in adopting as code automation principles to SD WAN?50:12Oh, sorry.50:59Not bad. Okay, and then the final question we have for you is, would you like customer success to reach out to you, to discuss SD wanna's code?51:08Yeah, that seems to be the the amount of people that answer. So I'll I'll move on. Thanks everyone for answering those much appreciated. Does help us kind of define content going forwards. Yeah, so we have a couple of references.51:46In here so you you'll get some of these afterwards. One is the SSP portal or just the SD one portal as it's called now configuration, and the other one is the.52:06Quick start to configuration policies, and that's it. Very short and sweet session, this one, right? It's not a, not a big topic, the configuration tool. So, with all that said, thank you and hopefully we'll see you on the next one.52:19