AUTO SDA LAB RACK RENTAL SETUP

[Raghas]

Hello Everyone,
I am trying to build a SDA lab for my company. The main purpose of this lab is to provide access to the employees to spend some time on the SDA equipment and learn from it.

I am setting up the LAB physical infrastructure in our Data Center and will provide the employees with remote access to the lab.

My main question is how can I setup a rack rental type setup. If a colleague books the lab for two days and do whatever changes in it in these two days, I want to revert them all at the end of his/her lease time. Employees should be able to book it via Outlook.

PS: I want to lock the initial basic configuration so that they do not break my initial underlay setup.  

LAB setup include:

• DNA center
• ISE (VM)
• 9300 Switches
• 3850 Switches
• 3560CX Switches
• WLC and APs
• Windows Servers (VM)
• Normal User Laptops/Phones etc.

 
Is there any functionality in DNA center that can help me achieve my goal? How does different vendors provide rack rentals?

How do they automate the complete procedure? I have not much idea about such stuff. All suggestions are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[jedolphi]

Hi Raghas,

I'm not aware of anyone doing what you describe today. There is no DNAC functionality today to fully automate an "undo" of many configuration changes spanning nearly infinite permutations (one rack rental user will do different things than the next rack rental user, even if you have a lab guide with precise step by step instructions. I've proctored SDA labs, people end up in all sorts of odd places). If you have spare time to create and refine a procedure, then my best advice right now would be for you to thoroughly test DNAC backup and restore functionality in conjunction with backup and restore on the network infra e.g.

*Get your SDA network to desired base configuration

*Snapshot ISE VM (Not an ISE expert, but I believe this is unsupported, but it works, usually)

*Backup DNAC using DNAC backup workflow

*Backup every networking component (switch, router, WLC, etc) in the SDA lab

Then after you user does whatever they need to do:

*Restore ISE VM from snapshot

*Restore DNAC from backup

*Restore all networking components to backed up config

(This is more or less how I run my lab)

But, since this most certainly an unusual use case for SDA/DNAC, and because ISE snapshot might not be officially supported (again, not an expert, but I believe that's the case), and because I don't know anyone that's thoroughly tested this scenario, I expect you'll find a few gotchas in this journey.

Jerome