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Smart Install: Central Director

markus.forrer
Level 4
Level 4

Dear Community,

I am working on my final project for my apprenticeship. My Assignment is to research and build a functional Zero-Touch Environment using Smart Install and Cisco LMS 4.0. The main goal is to achieve that whenever a Switch dies somewhere, the technician only has to connect a Device of the same Kind and it should "magically" get the right IOS and the most recent Configuration. That I have achieved for the most part. But..

In my Company we have quite a few hundres remote sites, some of them having a Director-capable Devices (3560 & 3560E), the Clients will be either 3560 or 2960 Access Switches. Whereever there is a director, there is no problem..:)

In some of our (very small) remote Sites there is however only a 2960. It would be nice to be able to do Zero-Touch there as well if the device should die eventually.

I've been looking around quite a bit, and have not found a satisfying answer. I would like to use LMS itself as the director of there small remote Sites, but I have not found any documentation nor Community-Questions regarding this.

Is there any way that I could use a Device other than a Switch that acts as the "main" Director?

This Device would be located at our datacentre in our headquarters and serve either all our remote sites or just those who have no director in the subnet.

There would be 6 Layer 3 Hops between our data-centre and the remote-Site so it should be fine with the 7-Hop Limit for Smart Install in the current Release.

Any Hints regarding this topic are greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

Sincerly,

Dario Doerflinger

(Apprentice of markus.forrer)

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

narakris
Level 1
Level 1

HI,

Your ISR Router in the remote branch can behave as the director proxy. you can configure vlan 1 and set the ip helper address to this central director across the cloud. I am assuming you have routing configured to reach the datacenter switch.  make sure all your clients switches in the remote location have zero config so that vlan 1 is enabled by defaulf and smartinstall kicks in.

director config on your datacenter switch should make sure that all models of client switches are addressed using built-in or custom switch groups and the DHCP pool is configured on the director for the client switches. if the dhcp server is external, make sure that it is directly connected to the director cos the director snoops the dhcp packets.

View solution in original post

2 Replies 2

narakris
Level 1
Level 1

HI,

Your ISR Router in the remote branch can behave as the director proxy. you can configure vlan 1 and set the ip helper address to this central director across the cloud. I am assuming you have routing configured to reach the datacenter switch.  make sure all your clients switches in the remote location have zero config so that vlan 1 is enabled by defaulf and smartinstall kicks in.

director config on your datacenter switch should make sure that all models of client switches are addressed using built-in or custom switch groups and the DHCP pool is configured on the director for the client switches. if the dhcp server is external, make sure that it is directly connected to the director cos the director snoops the dhcp packets.

Hey,

Thanks for the response. This would be a very good solution. However, we do not manage the routers for the cloud. They are managed by our providers and aren't ISR Routers. So there is the next obstacle in the way..^^

We're leaving out our Layer2-only Remote Sites for the current Release and maybe there will be another way in a future release to include these with our configuration.

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