Automation of Voice VLAN Change - Recommendation?

[dennisbehrens]

My team is looking for a suggestion of the best way to implement a method to change of the assigned Voice VLAN on a port.  Here are the assumptions:

- All switches are Catalyst switches, but of various models and IOS versions

- The program will be written in Node.JS

- We will know the switchport name, IP address of the switch, IP address and MAC Address of a currently connected endpoint to that switch port, and any credentials to the switch

- We will know the Voice VLAN that we want to set on the port

We had looked into APIC-EM as an option, but it does not appear to have the Northbound APIs to make these kinds of changes.

Otherwise we wanted to get some opinions on whether to implement a SSH client in Node.JS, or possibly use SNMP.  In addition, if there are any other ideas of other tools or methods to simplify the effort, it would be greatly appreciated.

[aradford]

You are correct, APIC-EM does not expose a "VLAN" change API.  There is a reason for that. 

There are two other options:

1) If you have Prime Infrastructure, it will let you run command templates that would do this via a REST API.

2) You could use something like WSMA to talk to the switch as well.  I wrote a little WSMA python library that shows you how this can be done.  GitHub - aradford123/wsma_python: a python module and examples for using the Cisco WSMA protocol for device programabili…

If you are interested in the Prime option I can share some code to show how that works with  a template.

[Marlin]

I was also looking for a solution beside APIC-EM to change the configuration of devices. I'm developing a webportal which is able to communicate with APIC-EM. PI seems to be a good combination alongside APIC-EM.

If you could share some code of the Prime option you mentioned, that would be awesome!

[aradford]

Some sample code here. .https://github.com/aradford123/cisco-prime-infrastructure-examples.git

auto_templates/configure_interface.py shows the API calls you can use.  It is actually pretty simple.

I will add more info on the README