Is anyone using NetConfig successfully on a large number of devices?

[micahcox]

I have RME 3.3 and have a number of problems with NetConfig. I have used CiscoWorks 2.x for some time upgrading configurations. I am seeing a pattern of people reporting unresolved problems such as jobs that end without trying a number of devices and configurations that are changed but not saved. Also problems with jobs run sequentially that run forever (days) without making changes. I ran into ALL of them. People (including myself) can run short jobs against the same devices but jobs with more than a few (such as 10) devices run into these problems. It seems like the Sun Solaris account or box might be limiting the number of telnet sessions outbound. However, Cisco doesn't seem to have any answers for this. One Cisco rep actually noted that a user should run short jobs of 10 devices. Someone got a bug created for the problem where configuration changes are not saved in these large config jobs. He mentioned over 1000 devices. This solution implies he would have to create over 100 jobs to make a simple change. That defeats the point of enterprise mangement software of course. So I would like to start by finding people who have routinely successfully changed the configurations of several hundred (or even 50) devices without getting any errors related to not saving the config. It must also try all devices. It's ok if a device was skipped because it was inaccessble. In fact, I would love to see if anyone has had it work correctly like that, where it runs into an error, and continues as version 2.x did. Anyone run a config job with alot of devices in parallel and had it not stop on errors? I would like to collect success and failure stories here to see if we can find a pattern. If you had to do something to get it to work let us know. IE, did you have to change some settings in Sun Solaris to allow more file handles, more telnet sessions, more TCP connections etc.

Micah Cox

mcox@hersheys.com

[rmushtaq]

NetConfig really works well you the user do not push it to the limits trying to create job that have 50 or 100 devices. It works well with 10-15 devices per job. It was never a intention to use this for a very large number of devices any way.

[sbanyas]

Micah. We have ran into much of the same errors as you. We do in fact limit our job sized to 10-15 devices per job...even for simple things like changing a syslog command. I would be willing to be you do not find anyone who has successfully ran a large job. The funny thing is what good is this if you can only change a handful of devices at a time? If my company only has a handful of devices, or even less than 100, you can be pretty sure to be they aren't going to spend the extravagent money that CiscoWorks2000 costs.

CiscoWorks2000 NetConfig is NOT an enterprise management piece of software unfortunately.

The funny thing is with the old version of CiscoWorks, 4.x I believe, you could script out exactly what you wanted and do as many devices as you wanted (like hundreds) and the software did it's job. At a previous employer, this is how we went about changing hundreds of passwords a month for our routers.

I guess newer isn't always better.

rmushtaq - is there anyway to perform a configuration change to a large number of devices since the application which bears the name NetConfig doesn't meet expectations?