Simplifying Wireless Operations with Cisco Catalyst Center

Oh alright good every good afternoon everybody. So today we'll be going through just an EIS session as part of the elevate with Catalyst Center series.00:00We'll be going through simplifying wireless operations with Cisco Catalyst Center. It's really great to meet you all. My name is Matthew Abel. I'm a customer success specialist here, and I have a colleague of mine Tyler Kiddle. If you do have any questions during the session, I'm going to direct you to the bottom right here.00:20Screen, there's gonna be a Slido panel, and if you, you know, pop up that window, you'll be able to populate your question in there and our panelists May and Adam will be able to help you.00:40So today we'll be talking, you know, about wireless deployment within catalyst center and what it takes to simplify some of those, those operations for managing things like our 9800 controllers. And so one of the 1st things that I want to cover today is the concept of intents. We can't really have a conversation.00:53Catalyst center, and wireless automation without talking 1st about intent. So, what intent is or intent driven automation is pretty much this core concept that we have within Catalyst Center and it's the idea of going into.01:13The GUI taking some action within the GUI, maybe triggering a workflow within Catalyst Center or upgrading a device or provisioning a device. And when we take that action, what catalyst center will do on the back end is it will collect together based on what it knows about your environment.01:33And about the devices that are within the catalyst center to generate a network device configuration in order to accomplish that task, right? And so of course in order to achieve this, what we need to do is configure Catalyst Center to have some information about the devices that we have.01:52Within it.02:12As well as your environment, so we'll we'll teach it about, you know, your sites and locations that you have in, in your network. And we have that all broken down quite nicely in this workflow. So 1st what we'll do is we'll define, this is gonna be building out the site hierarchy. So these are the locations.02:14That we have within Catalyst Center. We'll learn a little bit more about that in depth.02:33We can position our access points on the floor plans that we import into the catalyst center. Then we can do design where we specify our network settings, our network profiles, and our golden images for, you know, those standardized images that we wanna push out across our devices, and so we'll get, we'll get in.02:39Into that as well. And then we can deploy those devices, so our 98 hundreds, our access points and so on. And we'll come full circle to validation where we'll go in in detail about, you know, going through assurance, information to get some insights about our, our network health and our client issues.02:59Okay, so 1st let's go into the wireless deployment defined stage, right? So we'll, we'll talk a little bit about how to create our hierarchy. So how we can go in and we can create those those sites and add in those four plans within our catalyst center.03:18And, the way we can get here within the catalyst center UI is by going up into design and the network hierarchy, and what a site can be is either an area, a building or a floor.03:38And these are basically all just containers for things like network settings. You'll see later that these all tie back in together into this concept of intent, but you know an area is just a container of settings. We have a building which allows us to specify either an address.03:52Or a latitude or longitude so that way we can take advantage of the the map pocket map map box integration. And then we have our floors which are going to be a subset of our buildings which allow us to have those floor plans, where we can later use those to assign.04:13In place our access points and give us a visualization of that, that AP coverage.04:32So when it comes to the sites and maps, we do have a few different migration options. The 1st one being a manual import. So if you're coming over from something like Prime, or you have a backup of your existing sites.04:38And maps, you can import those directly into the hierarchy. This is a bit of a manual process, so we have other, other options as well such as the PDMT tool. So for those of you still on prime, we can do.04:54A coexistence that allows us to do that migration directly over. And then we also have an ECHO import for those of you who have echo house service and we'll talk about that in a bit more detail. So I want to quickly just discuss what our access point planning looks like.05:10And so you can see, here we have an example of a floor that we've defined. This floor has a floor map, and within that floor we have some, some access points in there. They'll have a little P that's denoted next to them. What these are is, is a planned access point. So whenever we place these on there.05:27They'll, they'll just exist until the actual access point is populated within the catalyst center that shares that same planned AP name, once that's populated in there, whether it's brought in through a discovered controller, or we onboard it through the plug and play process. Once it's onboarded, then it will automatically populate.05:48So this way you can go in and you can.06:07Do the AP placing in advance for those for those floor plans and a good functionality that sort of takes advantage of that planned AP feature is gonna be the integration. So we we have a direct.06:10Integration with Echo so we can automatically bring in those floor plans and AP placements, I'll show you briefly in a demo. Here we can see what that looks like. So we we see that we have a site that's defined there within the catalyst center hierarchy.06:28We can do the import echo projects to bring in that specific, site ECHOHL project, and from there it'll bring it in. It'll create those planned access points in there if we ever want to make a modification to this.06:44Echohale project that's been imported, we can always export it back out and, open it up in to make those modifications and then bring it back over, right? So once those access points are pulled into the catalyst center through one means or another.07:01Those will start to populate in sort of the floor plan based on the, where those planned access points are. So there you can see that those access points were planned and then now they're they've moved over to active APs.07:19So I'll quickly just go through this video demonstration of the echo integration, just so we can familiarize ourselves with it. So here in the network hierarchy we have a floor defined. You can see that there are two access points on there.07:37We want to export this out so that way we can open it up within Echow. And then we'll go ahead and open up the ESX file in our deployments.07:54We can then go in and make modifications such as adding obstacles and walls that we wanna be included within that R of coverage.08:14And we can continue to add, you know, those additional access points. And when we're ready, we can go ahead and re import that back into the catalyst center. And you'll see here in the the preview it's gonna be pulling in those planned access points. So here we're we're demonstrating with the plug and play process within catalyst.08:24We're going to be assigning these access points as they're onboarded onto the controller to those to that floor. And once those AP names, you know, populate within the catalyst center inventory, then we'll pull those directly into the floor plan there.08:45So these devices are being onboarded to those controllers now and in the network hierarchy we can see now in the floor that we have that AP one and AP two. Okay, so 2nd step in this.09:04Sort of wireless deployment workflow is gonna be designed and I think it's really important that we talk a little bit about the 9800 configuration model because we've come a long way since the aerost stays, and we've really provided a unique approach when it comes to the 98 hundreds.09:24So we, you know, now we have everything over on iOS XE and we have our, our tag structure for the configuration model. So I'll just quickly run down what each tag does. So the RF tags, these are used to define the RF properties for each bands. We'll talk a little bit more in detail.09:44We have the site tags, which bring together the AP join profile with our flex profile, these are gonna, you know, tell those access points and sort of define the properties of the central and the remote site APs.10:02And then we have the policy tags which bring together the WLAN and policy profiles. So let's quickly go through the components of a policy tag. Like I mentioned, the main purpose of a policy tag is to bring together the WLAN profile and link it with a policy profile.10:19So our, you know, the WLAN profile, what it's gonna pertain to is gonna be the settings about you know the ssids, the vssids, load balancing, band selects, you know, your wireless security et cetera.10:38And then we're gonna tie that to the policy profile where we define things like our our management VLAN, our switching mode, QoS rules and and our session settings. Then we have the site tag.10:53And this is gonna contain specific information about how APs are going to join the controller. So we'll set up our cap web settings, any backup controllers, and then we also have within that site tag your flex profile for those APs running in flexconnect mode.11:10Finally, we have the RF tag, which is gonna include a profile for each band and it's gonna allow us to manage settings like the data rates, the channel assignments or you know we can even have some modification of the settings for things like RRM, right?11:31So we'll, we'll revisit this, but this is sort of the 9800 model and how Catalyst Center begins to simp simplify this is by bringing together the RF profiles so we can define those RF profiles within Catalyst Center at, you know, a site specific level.11:51We also have additional features in catalyst center like the ability to convert these RF profiles into AI RF profiles, and we can take advantage of some some features like AIRRM.12:10And then what we've also done is brought together the site and policy tags into this concept of a wireless network profile. And so what that really looks like in practice is, you know, we're gonna be defining our com common settings across our sites with.12:21In the catalyst center. We're going to be assigning network profiles to our sites and this is gonna bring in our ssids, RF parameters, and any configuration templates that we have. Then we'll take our actual devices and we'll assign those to the Catalyst Center sites themselves.12:41So that way catalyst center can bring together that intent, right? And of course the APs as well. Okay, so in catalyst center, what this will actually look like is the network settings here. This is the the 1st piece.13:01And every site that we create within Catalyst Center is going to inherit from its parents. So the settings defined at the global level when you have a fresh catalyst center will just have a global site in there. Every time we add a site, it's gonna inherit for that parent. So, you know, we can, we can have those common share.13:17Configurations that defined at the global level and have the sites below it, you know, inherit those unless we have those site specific settings that we need to modify. So here we have the network settings, so common things like our AAA servers, our DNS servers.13:38NTP servers, time zones, message of the day banners, things like that we can define, you know, at that global or at that site specific level. And then also the device credentials that we want to use for catalyst center to manage these devices such as the CLI and SNMP credentials and the.13:55It's not mentioned here but also you know netconf as well on, on port 08:30.14:15Under the wireless network settings, so in, you know, design network settings of catalyst center, we have the wireless tab, and this is where you see a lot of that, you know, policy profile information.14:22That we're bringing together, right? So, you know, we can also specify things like RF profiles, AP profiles, and we can create our ssids here at a site level. We also have this concept within call center of a feature template, so this is like a pre baked config.14:36Duration to make these features a little bit simpler to use for our wireless customers, so.14:56You know, deploying things like clean air, event driven RM and and so on we can do through these feature templates. So now I'd like to just step through what it looks like to create a SSID in catalyst center.15:02And then create a wireless network profile. And then what it looks like to provision that onto a fresh controller through the plug and play and plug and play process. So, you know, creating a SSID in catalyst center is quite easy, so we, what we can do is we can go into design, network.15:19Settings wireless, and we can go into the SSID section there and we can go ahead and create a new one, for either enterprise or guest and within the SSID workflow here, it's gonna give you all of those different settings about QoS.15:39What kind of policy we want on this SSID, the triple A server that we want on this SSID, some advanced settings here, the security settings et cetera, any model config that we want to apply. And then once we've created that SSID, we can bring.15:58Get back.16:17To a wireless network profile and assigned it in there. So within a wireless network profile, we have our ssids, AP zones, model configurations, any day in templates that we want to apply or configuration that we want to apply as well as our site tags and aps.16:18Profiles so we can define all of that within the wireless profile here.16:38And that'll tie your controllers, to those sites within Catalyst Center and those sites and the profiles will sort of come together, right? So here we'll just step through the wireless network profile. We have the SSID assigned.16:43Here's some model configuration that we have. We have the some custom site tags that we want to apply to this network profile. And now we'll go through that greenfield onboarding with the 9800 controller.17:02And I did see there's a comments about you know brownfield configuration. Tyler is gonna go through a portion of that when we pass it over to him. So this is what it looks like to onboard a Greenfield 9800 through plug and play. So we have all of that intent configuration defined with.17:18The wireless network profile and we have our sites created. So now we can just onboard the WLC through the plug and play process and we'll go ahead and claim this device. We'll assign it to that site so that way catalyst center knows what kind of configuration to put onto it.17:40Here we're able to give it a new image through the catalyst center image repository, and we can also define those controller specific settings that it needs to onboard such as the WMI.18:00And then from there, you know, we'll, we'll just step through the workflow and here it's gonna generate a nice configuration for us and we can just claim that device. So it'll go through the image transfer, upgrade the device.18:17And it's going to provision on those, those settings that we defined in our wireless network profile. So let's just quickly go through a demo of what that's gonna look like. So we'll go ahead and define the network hierarchy.18:33We can place some planned access points onto the floor plan here and may I do see your question. We'll, we'll just wait for the demo here to end and then we'll.19:00Address that. So we're adding in some server information, we're creating our SSID, putting the AAA server on our SSID here, adding some model configuration, and.19:19And we're gonna associate this SSID to a wireless profile.19:38Wireless network profile. And we have that wireless network profile assigned to a site. We're gonna go and create some custom site tags and then from here, we have this.19:439800 controller waiting to be claimed in the plug and play inventory and so there we can go ahead and claim the device.20:02We'll go and assign it to that site, so that way it's gonna tie to that wireless network profile we created. We'll define the WMI information and from there it's generated that configuration.20:24In a short amount of time, it's going to put the device onto the correct version as well as provision on you know that all of that configuration or intent that that has created for.20:44Alright may I do see your hand raised. Do you have a question?21:20Yes, we do seem to have a problem, a technical problem with Slido, so if you want to ask questions, feel free to do so in chat and we will get to them in this way. Thank you. Thanks ma'am.21:24Okay, great. So yeah, we're we're gonna be, you know, continuing on. We'll, we'll discuss high availability within call center. So I'm gonna go ahead and pass it over to my, my colleague Tyler here to take us through high availability. Alright, perfect. Let me go ahead and share my screen real quick.21:40And then are you able to see my slide here? Okay perfect. So we'll go ahead and talk about the 9800 controller and how we can go ahead and configure HA in Catalyst Center.21:59So a couple of prerequisites before we get started, need to make sure that the active and my controllers are both added to the inventory section in catalyst center, in catalyst center. We need to make sure that both of the controllers are the same type.22:17In the same version version, so e.g. we can't have a 9800.22:3680 try to be paired up with a 90 hundred 40. So we need to make sure that they need to be a 9840 and the 9840 for HA to work. And then we have to make sure that the wireless management interface is configured on the standby controller.22:43And the best way to actually onboard that standby controller into catalyst center is through plug and play. So as you can, as you can see here, we have both of the controllers already in Catalyst Center in the inventory.23:02And we're gonna go ahead and click on configure WLCHA. And when we click on configure WLCHA will be brought to the page here for selecting the primary interface and the secondary interface, so.23:20Remember that for HA for cloud controller on the 9800, those should be assigned to gate free.23:40And the wireless management interface for the cloud controller should be assigned to get gig two. And then we also have our redundancy management interface IP addresses and once that is all configured and ready to go, we can go ahead and click on configure HA.23:47And when we click on configure HA, it's gonna give us a warning here that the devices are gonna go ahead and reboot and we'll lose access to them momentarily in Catalyst Center. And then as you can see here, they will become unreachable and manageability will go away while the devices are.24:05Devices are rebooting.24:25And finally, once the devices actually come up, get out my laser pointer here, you can actually see that there's a little chain option next to the 90 hundred controller and indicating that the HA FSO pairing have actually worked and is.24:27Successful. And another way that you can tell is by hovering your mouse over the chain.24:48And then you can see the primary and secondary controller. You can see that the sync status is duplex and the gateway monitoring is set to enabled. And if you want further veri verification, you can actually go to the controller.24:55GUI of the primary active device and then you go to monitoring and redundancy.25:15And you can check out the chassis details. You can see that chassis one is the active and the current state of the both of the active and standby are set to ready, so that this this means that HSSO is up and working proper properly.25:22Okay, so let's say there's an issue with the HA SSO pairing in catalyst center. What will happen is actually instead of seeing like a blue chain here, the change should appear as red and then the sync status instead of duplex will become.25:41And then you'll have a hyperlink here for HA SO analysis. And then what you can do is you can actually click on.26:02The HA SSO analysis link so there there was a question why isn't showing only one controller? So if we go back a couple of slides, I was showing two controllers here. We have.26:11Just configured HA for both of these controllers, and then once the controllers are fully rebooted, they are configured as essentially one controller, and then you again you have this little chain option here showing.26:28Or indicating that there are actually two controllers that are configured at HA. So instead of having two controllers being shown in the inventory, it will only show as one controller. I hope that answers your question there.26:45So back to the error mode here, so only active one shows yeah yeah so the the active controller will be the only one that shows in the inventory.27:03So going back to the error here, if there's any kind of error, you can click on HA so analysis and then you'll be brought to the MRE or machinery region machinery engine.27:20Page here and then it's gonna check in a couple of different things from check controller manageability, show RP and RMI status, so on and so forth. And once that is done running in the background in catalyst center, you can actually click on the conclusions option.27:37And then it'll give you a couple of different suggested actions to take in order to verify what the issue is and in order to get HA working again. So, once you have verified everything, if.27:55Everything is good to go. You can go ahead and click on the run again option, and then if nothing appears, then you can try to reconfigure HA again. Alright, so we'll go through and demo that again just to showcase that.28:14HASSO pairing in catalyst center. So we're in plug and play again and we're just now naming this controller instead of-one, we're naming it-1--HA for the standby controller.28:31And then we'll configure the wireless details for the IP addresses and whatnot, and once that's done, it'll go through the claiming process again, just like we saw with Matt's demo earlier for, the controller one here. It'll go through that.28:51Claiming process in plug and play. And once that controller is fully provisioned, we'll see it populate in the inventory.29:12And then once both controllers are in the inventory, we'll go ahead and only select that primary controller that we want to be active and we'll check the box and then go to provision and select configure WLCHA, and then we'll adjust the RMI IP.29:31The addresses.29:51And make sure that the network master is configured as well. Then controllers will go ahead and reboot, and then 2nd the secondary controller is gonna go away once both of the controllers come back online and then form that chain option under that primary active control.29:52Primary active controller.30:12Which so it looks like HA looks good. We see that chain option again and we should be good to go. Now, let's go ahead and talk about how we can.30:14Provision the controller in catalyst center.30:34After we configure HA, we can go ahead and push like configuration out to the controller, any kind of profiles and things like that. And what gets provisioned to the device when we do device provisioning, is the.30:38Site assignment will get pushed to the controller. We'll have to have a wireless profile.30:57Assigned to the network profile in catalyst center under that same site. And then we'll add the managed AP location, any interfaces that we need to configure on the controller or the SIDs and whatnot, and then we.31:07Finally we have the model config and the advanced config. So here we are back in the inventory, back under one controller for now. We're gonna check the box and go to actions and then provision and then provision device.31:25And then here, it looks like we're trying to configure an interface name for clients and we're gonna assign that client interface VLAN ID of two. We have the primary and secondary.31:44Locations managed for this controller in our network hierarchy of where we want our APs to actually be located and hit next. We can see that we have the model configuration.32:02And, in this model configuration, we have our ENT profile. If you want to go ahead and make any changes to this before we deploy the SSID to the controller, you can click on edit, and then it will bring you back to the advanced SSID configuration.32:20Page.32:40So we'll go ahead and click next. So, if we had any CLI templates such as like day zero or day N configuration templates to be pushed out to the controller, they would be assigned here but right now we're not working with templates, we're not gonna.32:41You'll see that option to check, check the template, but if we did have templates attached to the same wireless profile in catalyst center, then it should populate here and then you should be able to check that template and then push it out to the controller as well.33:01And finally, here is all the information that is gonna be pushed out to the controller. Just a quick note, we have our NTP server, we have our triple AAA radius server is server that's gonna be pushed out.33:20And then any other information that that we're gonna push from cattle center to the controller. And, in the later versions of cattle center made it mandatory to do some prechecks before pushing out to.33:35Any device in Catalyst Center, and that is the pre preview and deploy page here and the preview and deployed page is gonna show all the relevant and current information from catalyst center to be pushed out to to the to the device.33:53And once you verify that everything looks good and that.34:14You're not missing anything to be pushed out to the controller. You can go ahead and click out on deploy and it'll it'll start the deployment and provisioning process. One quick thing to note too about this configuration to be deployed is if you look at.34:19The see data information in the output here. This is basically the information that is going to be pushed out to the controller. So any kind of.34:39Any kind of information with data just know that that's the information that's trying to be pushed out to the controller. So we be we are brought back to the inventory page after clicking on deploy.34:53And then if we want to filter for all of our devices that have been provisioned or are in the provisioning process, we can actually go to the focus view here at the top and then change it from default or inventory to provision, and then we will only get a list of devices.35:08Tools that have only been provisioned in catalyst center to simplify your troubleshooting.35:28Next we're gonna go ahead and click on see details of the provisioning status and as you can see that there are NO issues and it will take the provision provision provisioning jobs that was done earlier as well. So here you can see that we did device.35:37Controllability and telemetry. We did HA provisioning, we did model config provisioning, and then device provisioning, device controllability and telemetry. So anytime you do a provision provision of a device to center, this information should get populated here and then.35:56If you click on the three details, you can get even further information as to what got pushed to the controller or switch or any device in your network.36:16And just a quick note here on this page, if there's any kind of errors that happened it should populate here. It'll say like error and then it'll hopefully give you a pretty good reason as to why the device errored out and did not provision at that time.36:29Okay, so let's go ahead and go to the GUI of the 9800 controller and talk about what actually got provisioned. So remember we had our triple AAA server, we had the profile, the WLAN, and the site tag.36:47One quick, one quick way to know that provisioning actually worked on a controller is if you do provision a triple AAA server to the controller, you will see the naming convention change for your server IP to.37:08And then that's a pretty good indication.37:26To know that provisioning worked well, or this particular controller in your network. And then if we go to the profile, we can see that we have that ENT profile SSID get created and the admin status is up.37:30And then under the WLAN we have the ENT profile in all of our model configurations or advanced model configurations that got pushed as well. Alright, so we were pretty much talking about the controllers.37:49Up to this point. Now we're gonna dive into the APS and how they work with center plug and play onboarding and and things of that nat nature. So, I was reading a couple things in the chat about.38:09Plug and play discovery for APs and things like that so I think this slide is gonna answer some questions for you on that, on that regard. But remember the old way of, of.38:27Discovering APs to a controller with DNS is to use the web controller.local domain. We're not gonna use that way anymore for plug and play purposes. We are just gonna use the PNP server.local.38:43Domain, for the for the AP discovery and that PMP server is gonna be essentially catalyst center and then the local domain is gonna be your DNS domain for your company.39:02And then we also have a second way of option 43 for plug and play with a catalyst center. In that option 43 string on your Microsoft DHCP server or Infoblox server, whatever you use for your company.39:18You have to make sure that the string matches exactly here like you have, like you see on the page here. We want to make sure to include all of these characters and then we have our 198.eighteen 01:29 one.one hundred. That's gonna be the.39:35Center enterprise IP address for plug and play discovery, and then finally we're gonna end it with J eight 80. If it's not matching exactly the way it is, it's not gonna work. Your your APs are not gonna get discovered through plug and play.39:55In catalyst center. Okay, so there's a couple of different ways that we can go ahead and add APs to plug and play in catalyst center. We can do a single add, bulk add or add them through the smart account.40:13I'm gonna go ahead and click on, add devices in bulk, and what we're gonna do is before I even upload my plugin to play CSV file, I'm gonna download the file template.40:32And basically in the file template, this is gonna show you what we're essentially looking for in regards to how to set up your CSV file for AP plug and play.40:50Couple things to note, like you don't need to have every single field filled out if you have all that information, great, it'll make a lot things a lot easier. If you don't have that information, what you can do is you can just like comma out the rest of.41:08The fields in that file, but you have to make sure that we have all all of the commas or you're gonna be throwing an error in cattle center that it's not matching the template. And then once everything is good to go.41:26We'll click on import devices or we'll upload or we'll upload that CSV file and then we'll click on import devices. So as you can see here, I'm trying to add two APs through plug and play.41:42Through that CSC file template that I I imported and I'm gonna go ahead and click on add and claim. So when I click on add and claim, I'll be brought back to the plug and play workflow.42:01And if there are any kind of naming convention that you want your AP to be named, you can go ahead and do that here and make sure that the device type is set to AP. I think there's an option for mobility Express as well that you'll see later on. But for.42:18Pretty much everything in regards to like a 9800 controller, we, we, we wanna make sure that the device type is tied to AP. So hit next and then once you name your AP and have it assigned to a site and everything like that.42:38If you didn't configure it for the RF profile, you'll be able to change that option here. And if everything looks good, we'll go ahead and go to the summary and you'll be able to preview the configuration, just make sure that what is.42:57There's what you want and then finally, we'll go ahead and click on claim here at the bottom and quick note, when you import the devices to be claimed for the APs, they're gonna start out as the source of user.43:16And then, once the workflow goes through a thing for claiming, the the source should change to network once everything is done here, but.43:34During the claiming process, you'll see additional information get populate populated like the IP address, the Mac address, the image version of the AP, model of the AP.43:51Serial number, so on and so forth. So if there's any kind of data zero configuration that you wanted to be pushed as well to the APs that can be done here.44:05But it looks like it we just have our typical data zero configuration to be pushed and once that is done, we're gonna go ahead and rethink the controller.44:21So we can get the most populated in the inventory in catalyst center. So it looks like the provisioning status is done and completed and everything looks good. And now after syncing the controller to catalyst center, we can now see our two.44:36New APs in catalyst center and they are reachable and they're managed and if you want to do provisioning to the APs, you can go ahead and do that as well.44:56So, now we'll go ahead and talk about what we can configure and what gets pushed to an AP during provisioning. We saw that AP name and location.45:09Those are gonna be the fields here, AP triple zero one and the location of the AP was populated, and then the AP mode. So if we're doing FDA fabric, it should change the mode there.45:26The AP mode currently to local, so we're not doing any kind of like flex connect locus switching or anything like that if we were, then we would want to specify that prior and then the AP mode should get pushed.45:42And change it to flex. And then also the country code is also also pushed out to the controller for the APs in order for the AP to join the controller as well. And if we drill down a little bit further, we can see not only.46:00Only the AP name location.46:20In location, the AP mode and the country code on the AP is what we can see the tags that get pushed to the AP. So if you go to the upper right hand corner and click on the tags field, you'll see the policy tag, the site profiles and tags.46:22And you'll see the RF profiles and RF tags. And then here's like a little tree diagram to show.46:42What is currently configured for AP O one. So we have our ENT global profile that we saw earlier. We have the default AP join profile currently, we didn't do anything with the site tag there and then finally we pushed.46:49The high RF property tag for the RF tag here. So how do we go about positioning APs in catalyst center? If you go to the.47:07Floor hierarchy under define the network hierarchy, you should see APs like in the upper right hand corner. And then if you click on like edit, view options or like edit, add and edit, you should be able to.47:24See a tab for procession APs and then once you're done processing the APs, the heat map generation data should get populated on the screen in cattle center and you can adjust like the RF supply thresholds and whatnot on the, on the right hand side.47:41Up of the page here.48:01All right. So we'll go ahead and show that in a quick demo video video real quick. So again, we're gonna go ahead and go to plug and play and add devices and do a bulk add, choose file, we have that AP plug and play file.48:04Upload it, make sure things are good to go. Looks like we don't have any errors, so we're gonna go ahead and click on add and claim and then change any settings that we need to change during the claiming process.48:25And then after a couple of minutes, it'll go through the onboarding progress of device claimed. And one thing, one thing to note too real quick is the state of the APs are currently planned. I think we show later on in the demo presentation.48:47And it goes from planned APS to active APS so that these two APS will be able to.49:07Start servicing clients within catalyst center and on your controller. Alright, so they're out of the unclaimed field and that they should be in the all field now. Yep, there they are. Let it finish the onboarding progress workflow.49:14Alright, so they are ProVis provisioned. We resync the controller and now you can see both of the APs are currently in catalyst center in the inventory.49:38For now I think we go to the defined page and then the network hierarchy and go to our floor map, and then as you can see here, we have our two plan APs currently generating heat map information for us.49:50Yeah. And then if we go to the controller, click on the tree for the AP, we can see all the relevant policies and profiles that are populated for the, for the APs.50:09Alright, moving forward here. Wireless deployment stage, deployment, brownfield. So I think this was a lot of what a lot of you guys were wanting to go over and finally made it to that point.50:31So a long time ago in catalyst center, we had a feature called learn device configuration that would essentially bring in your ssids and profiles and everything from your controller into Catalyst Center.50:50But we had a lot of issues with that and not a lot of feature parity between catalyst center and the controller. So we went ahead and had and applied to deprecate that feature in catalyst center. And then we implemented a new feature called wireless campus automation or short term.51:07Per device configuration for your 90 hundred controller.51:27And basically what all this is gonna do is before you even see this page here, you're gonna have an option to turn on per device configuration for the controller, and once you click enable, you're gonna see.51:31Basically the GUI of the 90 hundred controller inside of catalyst center. So you're not gonna have to go to your controller GUI any further to make any changes or do anything along that nature.51:48So, one quick note too, once you do click on enable, for device config for the controller, it will look like this. I don't think right now we have a way to disable it, but.52:04Once you enable it, it, you should be able to go to the controller and make changes if you want to, even though you don't, you don't technically have to do this. What version is this available in now? So it should be available in 23710 and eleven.52:19If I'm not mistaken, so it should be on two through 7-eleven and also too, we did make an enhancement, I believe in three.two with per device configuration and and we made it so that we can.52:38Push out configurations to multiple controllers at the same time. So in 23711, if you make the changes on the WLC Delta Catalyst Center override it, if you make the change on the controller Delta catalyst center override it. So with per device.52:54No, so basically what will happen is if you enable per device config and you make a change on the controller, Center will re sync the, the device the 9800.53:15And then, it will update the information in cattle center on on this page here. So let's say you configured like an ARA profile on a controller and you didn't do it here through per device config.53:27Cattle Center will refresh re sync the device and then that RF profile should be generated here in cattle center. So hope that answers the question there and.53:44Yep, so we have our WLAN profile information, so if we want to push out any to the controller through per device config, we can go ahead and do that as well.54:02RF information. So this is just going through all the different fields that we have in in per device config, and it's essentially showing you the feature parity, which is a lot better in my opinion than the old learn device configuration.54:20I think the enable or the per device config is very beneficial if you have both both controllers in your network so that you don't have to go to the GUI of each one anymore, and you can just do everything in cattle center.54:39And one thing to note too, if like there's some feature parity that's not there in the device config, what you can do is quick click on the question mark icon and then you should see like a make a wish.54:57Option there in the menu, and then if there's a feature that you want that's not there, go ahead and edit and it should hopefully come in a later release in catalyst center. Brownfield AP plug and play.55:13So, yep so this is talking about the existing 90 hundred controller, interesting config profiles and tags, and in catalyst center, the AP will be discovered.55:31Added to the site and then telemetry enabled on the controller and the AP as well. So I think this is just showing the old way of doing it, so.55:48We have our AP regular expressions, and then we have our policy tag name, site tag name, RF tag name. This is what we did before, when we if we didn't have cattle center to manually like assign information like policy tag, the site tag and RF tag.56:01To the APs.56:22So, here we have the onboarding template for the AP plug and play, brownfield, AP plug and play. We have the project name will be set to onboard configuration.56:24It'll be a regular regular template type. We'll keep the template template language as ginger, and then the software type is going to be iOS XE, and then the device family is going to be the wireless controller.56:42And then this is all the information that's gonna be set up in the file for the AP onboarding plug and play. We're gonna have our normal HA configuration for the AP, like the primary WLC name and IP, secondary.57:01Oh, if we had a tertiary controller, you can put that in here as well. And then we'll set up the policy, the site tag in the RF tag. And then just like we did with the Greenfield AP import, we're gonna have that same file.57:19Here as well but this time because we're doing brownfield, we are not gonna go ahead and configure a site and we are gonna select device type as AP and E for mobility Express.57:38So again brought here to the plug and play screen in catalyst center. As you can see we have our AP brownfield plug and play devices here, APO one and O two, and then click on add and claim.57:59So we want to make sure that we have the device site to AP and then this time we are not gonna set a site because it'll it'll, it should do it for you depending on the AP location and the controller location.58:17I believe template, we are gonna go ahead and assign a template this time and we're gonna select that AP PMP CL US template.58:34And go ahead and click on save, and then we're gonna select both of the APs. And as you can see here on the summary page, we have the configuration for the template that is gonna be pushed to the APs and then NO site configuration for the APs.58:49And the device is ready to be claimed and then it'll go through that workflow and then eventually eventually the onboarding process will change to provision and it should appear in the inventory section in kettles.59:08So go through that demo again. So this is showing us that we have currently one AP on our network, APO four, and this is all the information that is currently assigned, right? We have the default RF tag.59:30And then, we have the brownfield WLAN policy configuring on the AP. And then get back here, but go through this thing.59:48So if we go back to center, again, these are two plan APs. After we go ahead and do the onboarding through plug and play, you'll see the the two plan APs. You can see the little P option here in the top left.01:00:06For plan APs, that should go away and it should show as active and start screen clients.01:00:26Copy the MAC address of the AP. I think we're gonna put it into the template here that's just showing the template prop properties right now, we're just gonna keep it plained and simple.01:00:37We're gonna configure the WLC IP, and we're gonna configure the WLC name. Project name is onboarding configuration.01:00:54And then now we'll go to plug and play and add our devices like we did before. This time using the brownfield file, and then we're not gonna configure a site.01:01:09And then add that.01:01:30AP plug and play CLUS template. And then we have our APO two as well. So we only had one AP on there after this the we should have two APs that are gonna be joined to the controller, and then we're just simply gonna bounce support for the.01:01:31Connectivity to kick off again. Now everything is provisioned and ready to go. Now if we go back to the controller, now we have three APs on there, our APO one and APO two.01:01:51And then if we go to our map, you can see that the plan AP now changed to an active AP and generating that heat map information for us.01:02:10And then after we sync the controller, after we sync the controller, we can see that we have our APO one and APO two there as well. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and pass the ball back over to Matt and he's gonna close this out on how we can go ahead and upgrade the controller in catalyst.01:02:29Matt, you Thank you. Yeah, there you go. You're good. You're on mute.01:02:59By the way. Thanks Tyler. So yeah, we did have a quick question coming, so I want to address that quickly before we move on. So what, what kind of pre staging do we need to do on the APs? So if we're doing this sort of brownfield AP P and P situation, NO, nothing.01:03:05Doesn't needs to be pre staged onto the access point. It just needs to have some sort of discovery method to get in contact with the catalyst center. So a common method for that would be like an option 43.01:03:25So once it's in contact with that catalyst center and once it's populated in the catalyst center as a, as a unclaimed device, we can stage it in that step there with the template that we defined. So since it's a brownfield con config.01:03:38Configuration, we have a template that we can stage it.01:03:57Right there when we do the claiming process with the IP address of the WLC that you want it associated with and the names of the tags that you want on it as well. So yeah, so thank you Tyler for that awesome demo there. So we'll go ahead and continue on. We'll briefly talk about swim and then we'll we'll get.01:04:00Into the Q and A here.01:04:20So just to briefly talk about software image management in Catalyst Center, and this is something you know whether you're Greenfield or brownfield. If you have your controllers populated in Catalyst Center, you can take advantage of this. What we can do is you know 1st we.01:04:24You have the the devices here in the inventory.01:04:42We can check things like end of life status on the devices. We can get some additional details about the device by going into the the view device details here. We can have some information about compliance on the device, so we can see here that, hey, our software image.01:04:45Is in non compliance, right? So what exactly does that mean in the context of catalyst center?01:05:05So in Catalyst Center we have the idea of a golden image. So a golden image is an image that we have, you know, pre downloaded onto the catalyst center. We have an integration with software.cisco.com. So if you enter your Cisco credentials into your catalyst center, you can.01:05:10Download those, you know, newer latest images onto the catalyst center locally?01:05:30And from there we can mark those as golden. So if we want all of our, all of our all of our 98 hundreds at this specific site to be running the version 17 ten.01, then we could go ahead and and mark that as golden.01:05:36And when we mark that as golden, what that'll do is go through and mark any of these devices that are not running that version. Say in this example we have this device running seventeen.6.four. It's gonna flag those as non compliance. So you'll be able to see that here in the compliance summary.01:05:55You know, we also get information about the security advisories on, the device so that way we can, you know, get, get just a ton of addition additional information about what kind of software we're running on this device, what we're vulnerable to and how we can remediate some of that.01:06:15So here's just an example of, you know, we can see the advisories, we can see what versions that they're fixed in and here we can see the image repository that I was mentioning earlier. So here we can integrate our Cisco credentials. We can go through the process.01:06:34Of selecting a golden image for this device family of 9800. We can do this at the site specific level too if you're trying to run different images, but you know typically what we're looking at doing is trying to standardize as much as we can.01:06:53So we can select that, we can apply different add ons, AP service packs et cetera, that are included with that image. And once we've marked that as golden, any of our controllers that are, that are, you know, meet those criteria.01:07:11They're gonna show as needs update unless they're already on that current version. And we get a nice upgrade readiness check that's gonna like do some, you know, different checks like the flash check file transfer check to make sure that it's gonna be able to get that image onto the device.01:07:27There's a, there's a couple of other configuration checks it does, and we can kick off the image update. So I just have a quick demo here that we can go through together. So this device is in need of update. We'll go through, we'll generate a task.01:07:45Here it's gonna go through some pre prechecks for both software distribution and activation. That's the way that we break this out. And the prechecks, what they'll do is they'll do some, you know, commands on the device.01:08:02We can create custom checks as well. So if we need to do some sort of show command that we want to validate after, but both before and after to make sure that it maintains consistency, things like CDP neighbors, it'll do just to make sure that, you know, the network state hasn't changed before or after.01:08:18We've either distributed or activated the software.01:08:38We can go ahead and schedule this to be, you know, at, at a, we can schedule that distribution and activation to be at a later date. We can also integrate this with things like ServiceNow to allow for ITSM integration, which is a pretty cool closed loop integration that we offer.01:08:42And then we also have the option to do a flash cleanup, so if we want the, you know, older version of the image to be cleaned up off of the device, once the activation of the software has been confirmed and we've gone through all of those post checks, we can select that to do that as well.01:09:02And so here we can go ahead and kick off that update. We'll get a nice little, little progress to show us as we go through the process of distributing the software. We also do support things like doing ISSU directly from catalyst center as well. So that's just something that I've.01:09:22Here I've mentioned here.01:09:42And so we can see that the software is going to distribute and, you know, there it's unpacking the image, it's going through AP pre image download.01:09:43Here we see that it's going through the steps to do activation so I did see that comment about XFSU support.01:10:06I believe that that is coming in a3.X release. I don't have the specific release on the top of my head, but is it three two yeah ok yeah so there we go. So, you know, pretty straightforward process. We mark our golden image.01:10:25We go through the process of updating that image once it's, you know, showing as non compliant, and the reason that I wanted to go through this is to segue into, you know, another, really cool solution that we're bringing to to you guys to capture a lot of these predictive.01:10:46Insights and and things regarding things like software conformance.01:11:06That you might be interested in. So what, what I would like to just quickly talk about is Cisco IQ, so we have these these assessments and we can bring in and leverage tools like Catalyst Center through our IQ link connector. But this is a SaaS application.01:11:10That allows you to, you know, keep track of those things and generate reports very easily on things like security advisories field notices, and all of that. And what we're currently going through is a expert insight series on, on the Cisco IQ, so you can see.01:11:30See that the next session is coming up.01:11:49On the 15th, if you're interested in learning a bit more about Cisco IQ, you know, please feel free to grab that QR code while we're here. So I'll just give everyone a moment if you are interested.01:11:52Awesome. And so, you know, we'll, we'll just quickly talk about a call to action and then we'll go into our Q and A.01:12:13So, you know, we we've tried our best to bring things as as much as possible for the simplifying wireless automation through catalyst center in the catalyst center as possible. Things like per device configuration.01:12:19Et cetera, so that way we can consolidate those googies for you within one management plane. You know, catalyst center PNP is definitely pretty awesome, especially things like the brownfield, APPNP.01:12:37If you want to be able to bring those access points all into one place where you can provision them onto those controllers rather than, you know, having them assigned to those controllers directly through, through plug and play or through DHCP.01:12:52It's a pretty, pretty interesting way to, to do this kind of automation for us since we have those controllers already in there and we can we can bring that all together. And yeah, so you know if you can take advantage of intent based configuration where you can, it's definitely another awesome one.01:13:10Way to, you know, approach the, the wireless configuration in general. So what I'm gonna do here is just open it up for Q and A So feel free to drop any questions into the chat, and we'll stay on for just a few minutes, but I I really appreciate everyone's time.01:13:29If you want to, you know, engage with us in a one on one manner, please reach out to your account representatives and just ask for, customer success engagement and we're more more than happy to help you out. So thank you so much.01:13:48We'll just be here for a few minutes while we wait for questions do we know when cat center three two will be start? I think by the end of this year, not early next year, second half.01:14:04Of FY 27. That's what I'm hearing. Yeah, so yeah when it comes to those processes, you know, it's really hard for us to get strict dates. The testing is on those platforms as we go into recommended release.01:14:21Sometimes they're pretty rigorous, so, there are certain KPIs that they need to meet before they can move that software out of control availability. So you know if you do wanna take advantage of three.two today.01:14:40You can, it's in its control availability state and we can, you know, we can give you provide that assistance on the migration process. We're, we're definitely working on that migration process. The utility.01:14:57Now is all built directly into, the software instead of having to use an external utility if if that's what you're mentioning there in terms of the streamlining of the process. So it's definitely much better than it was if you were to look at it, you know.01:15:13Yeah Half a year ago at this point, we've definitely made some improvements there alright, we'll just give it, you know, another minute if anyone has any other questions.01:15:30Feel free to drop them in the chat.01:15:50Cloud control, not sure. I think it's probably coming. I think we're working on it. Yeah, well, those those conversations you know the cloud control did just go GA as previous week. So a lot of these conversations are gonna be you know controlled by.01:16:15Engineering, so those folks are are gonna be more closely in touch with people wanting to get their hands on the product today.01:16:35But as we continue to roll out EIS, you know, we'll, we'll definitely have some cloud control going into the future.01:16:41Dennis, I'm pretty sure that.01:17:03Advanced ID configuration template should be applied to the controller, and then you're gonna provision the controller which would provision the APs. Yeah, so that, that SSID configuration you're going to be, you know, defining that within the network settings of of the.01:17:07So under that wireless tab, and so if you're doing, you know, controller provisioning, you would assign that into the, you know, into the the SSID when you create it, you would assign those ssids into your wireless network profile.01:17:27And then from there the the wireless controller is when you provision them, those ssids will be provisioned onto them. Yep. We do offer what are called flexible reports.01:17:45And, you, you can find that from the reports menu in catalyst center and that allows you to specify what kind of metrics you want to have contained within the report. That said the the options there may may or not may not fit your needs, so, you know.01:18:02If, if you're looking for something in there and you can't find it, feel free to do a make a wish or something like that. But those are called flexible reports.01:18:23