My team runs a multi-site network, all Cisco, not a ton of devices, but not too little that Image, IPAM, monitoring, Config Management, etc couldn't benefit from some modern management techniques.
We've started down the idea of IaC with Gitlab/Ansible but haven't really started in a dedicated way, yet. Complicating the matter, we discovered that our corporate overlords purchased an EA with Cisco for DNA Advantage on all of our devices, plus SWSS, etc.
We have Baremetal Appliance Version of ISE, FMC, and WLC; with ideas of moving to a newly installed ESXI Cluster to manage virtual versions of some of those features.
My primary question is: How do I tackle the argument of DNA center versus Prime Infrastructure? Or I guess what would you do?
The way we understand it, we could get a 100 dollar license for Prime Infrastructure and run it in ESXI, and the Devices Licenses are managed by the DNA Advantage portion. Or we could shell out 80K to get a DNA Center Appliance. Ive heard rumor that you can do DNA Center in an unsupported way with ESXI, and YouTube seems to detail that, but probably not best practice.
Ideas?