DNAC onboarding and day N configuration

[Patrick Colbeck]

Hi

I have a customer that wishes to use DNAC to deploy new switches to lots of remote sites to replace their EOL switches. We cant use normal PnP due to the WAN being MPLS and with the routers being under service provider control and not forwarding traffic on VLAN 1.

So we plan to use the minimal config on USB thumb drive thing then onboard the switches into DNA-C then deploy port configs from templates.

The question really is about the port config for the port that links to the MPLS router. We want to have a day N template for that as in the future they might want to add or remove VLANs (its an L2 trunk to the router). The question is can you apply a template to the port that connects you to DNAC or will the port go down as the template is pushed ?

Thanks

[Preston Chilcote · Accepted solution]

For the first step, hopefully you are aware that the PnP agent on the router or switch will automatically look for a file called ciscortr.cfg on flash and load config from there if the other PnP options fail first.  That saves you some manual effort during bootstrapping.

When it comes to deploying the day-N template over the WAN link, think about it the same way a human would, entering cli one line at a time.  Essentially that is all DNA-C does as well.   That, of course, means you need to be careful not to break the connectivity between the device and DNA if you are reconfiguring the wan link.   You'll want to avoid things like "shutdown" most of all.

[Patrick Colbeck]

Thanks Preston

That's how I thought it worked but wasn't sure. We will have a small lab with some test switches (for 802.1x testing prior to rolling that out) so we can test the profile to make sure we get the order of commands right and dont cut ourselves off