Introducing a Production WLC to Catalyst Center

[joeharb]

We have a brownfield deployment of our WLC 9800's and are now deploying Catalyst Center.  We have added the device to the inventory but have not added it to a site or provisioned it, at this point we are not getting any health or telemetry stats.  I have researched and some of the articles/posts make me nervous that DNAC will break what is already in place.  Has anyone performed this task and where there any gotchas?  I would prefer to at least the short term to continue use the WLC interface until we are more familiar with DNAC.  The WLC we have added is a small deployment with only 2 WLANs provisioned and about 20 APs.

Any information or assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Joe

[maflesch]

Hi, Cisco Catalyst Center can operate with brownfield devices such as 9800s. However, this will limit the functionality that you can do if you plan to manually manage the wireless network after onboarding the WLCs and APs.

One thing you could do is use the Learn Device Config workflow to import a lot of the manual configuration from the WLC so that the Catalyst Center is aware of that configuration. Please review the guide below for more details on that:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/cloud-systems-management/network-automation-and-management/dna-center/2-3-5/user_guide/b_cisco_dna_center_ug_2_3_5/m_dnac_workflows.html

For telemetry, the WLC needs to be assigned to a site for the telemetry subscriptions to push. This will then allow the telemetry to establish between the WLC and the Catalyst Center so that Assurance data is being transferred. During the site assignment, you may see some changes or additions to the snmp credentials as Catalyst Center will add host entries so it can recent trap information.

You can continue to manually use the WLC after this point but be aware that manual configuration goes against the purpose of Catalyst Center as a management controller.

[joeharb]

Thank you so much for you reply, maybe I am being overly cautious. I started to review the link and will read through in detail more but I think I am going to start a TAC case to make sure we proceed properly.
Thanks,
Joe

[Preston Chilcote]

@joeharb TAC isn't the best place to ask initial deployment questions .  Talk to your account team to get introduced to a Customer Success Specialist.  They are the experts that can talk you through the process and best practices to help you adopt Catalyst Center.