Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Onboarding Guide, Releases 26.x and Later

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Mode discovery and mode change with a bootstrap file

Updated: July 7, 2026

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Explains mode discovery and mode change with a bootstrap file.

Describes mode discovery and mode change using a bootstrap file.

Preventing a device from booting in Controller mode

If your Cisco IOS XE Catalyst SD-WAN device is already running an older Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN configuration version or file and when you upgrade your device from Cisco IOS XE Catalyst SD-WAN Release 16.x to Cisco IOS XE Catalyst SD-WAN Release 17.2.1r or later, the device boots up in Controller mode. To prevent the device from booting up in Controller mode, before performing the device upgrade, ensure that you remove the stale Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN configuration file from the bootflash, and delete all artifacts of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN from the bootflash.

To delete all the artifacts:

  • delete /force bootflash:/ciscosdwan*.cfg

  • delete /force /recursive bootflash:/.sdwaninstallerfs

  • delete /force /recursive bootflash:/.sdwaninstaller

  • delete /force /recursive bootflash:/.sdwaninternal

  • delete /force /recursive bootflash:/sdwan

  • delete /force /recursive bootflash:/vmanage-admin

  • delete /force /recursive bootflash:/.cdb_backup

  • delete /force /recursive bootflash:/.installer/active

  • delete /force /recursive bootflash:/.installer

Configuration file prerequisites for mode change

Table 1. Configuration file prerequisites

Current Mode

Mode change to

Platforms

Configuration file and location

Controller

Autonomous

All supported platforms

ciscortr.cfg in any file system available to the device

Autonomous

Controller

  • Cisco Cloud Services Router, CSR1000v

  • Cisco Integrated Services Virtual Router, ISRv

  • Cisco Catalyst 8000V

  • Cisco ASR1002-X

ciscosdwan_cloud_init.cfg on bootflash, USB, CDROM0, or CDROM1

Autonomous

Controller

  • Cisco Aggregation Services Router, ASR 1000 Series

  • Cisco Integration Service Routers, ISR 4000 series and ISR 1000 series routers

ciscosdwan.cfg on bootflash or USB

Upgrading a device already running a Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN image

On a device that is already running a Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN image, after upgrading to a Cisco IOS XE Catalyst SD-WAN Release 17.2.1r or later image, the device boots up in Controller mode.

Booting Cisco CSR 1000v and Cisco Catalyst 8000V devices in Controller mode

On a Cisco CSR1000v device (for Cisco IOS XE Release 17.2 or later) and a Cisco Catalyst 8000V (for Cisco IOS XE Release 17.4 or later) image deployment, if you want to boot up the device in Controller mode, load the bootstrap file generated by Cisco SD-WAN Manager by bootstrap (ESXi, KVM, and OpenStack) or user-data (AWS) or custom-data (Azure and GCP).

The following fields must be present in the ciscosdwan_cloud_init.cfg bootstrap file:

  • otp

  • uuid

  • vbond

  • org