I purchased two 9300L switches from the Cisco store through Amazon.com. I received my switches, and then had to jump through the amazing number of licensing hoops to register my devices with the smart license portal. That only took about 6 hours of work to get done, plus more hours of reading/watching Youtube videos.
So I finally got my switches added to the Smart Licensing portal. It shows that I have sufficient C9300L 24P Network Essentials licenses, because those came with the switch (you might want to do a better job of explaining this to people). But I require 2 C9300L 24P DNA Essentials licenses. Being a good customer, we want to properly license our devices and be done with this. However, there is a little snag. Cisco has provided no information on how to purchase these licenses. I read the licensing guide for the 9300L platform, and sure enough there are product SKUs available to buy for this. I searched these SKUs on the CDW website, and purchased 2x the 5 year DNA Essentials license for these devices.
However, how do I get these licenses into my smart portal now? My CDW rep doesn't seem to know. The Cisco website assumes that you have purchased these devices through Cisco apparently, as that's the only explanation for how to order these licenses provided in the official documentation: Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Ordering Guide - Cisco
If you want people to buy into this new insanely complicated licensing scheme, maybe you should actually make it so people can buy the licenses you say are required and give them instructions on how to add them to the "smart" licensing portal? I want to congratulate Cisco on creating the dumbest "smart" portal ever made.
Someone at Cisco do me a favor. Get the team together. Have everyone on the team order 2 Cisco 9xxx switches, and have them be involved in configuring the devices for "smart licensing". At the end, everyone on the team will either have quit, or will be forcing the engineers to change this system to something that actually makes sense.
