Cisco Prime Infrastructure WorkFlows for Converged Access – Single Switch Branch Network WorkFlow

Cisco Prime WorkFlows for Converged Access are designed to help simplify the deployment of Converged Access architecture quickly and error free. There are 3 WorkFlows  – Small network, Large network and Centralized network deployment.

The focus of this document is deployment of small branch offices using the Single-Switch Small Branch Deployment Model.

Single Switch Branch Overview

The small-size remote branch office or retail store may consist of a single or a stack of Ethernet switches to provide network connectivity to the wired and wireless users. Such small networks can converge the Ethernet switching with next-generation wireless capability on the same Catalyst switch.

For such network designs, the switch can integrate WLC Mobility Controller (MC) and Mobility Agent (MA) functions without requiring any additional Converged Access elements, such as Switch-Peer-Group (SPG) in the network. These networks may need Guest wireless services, as well as common security and network access policy enforcement across all branch offices.

The network administrator can use Cisco Prime Infrastructure IOS-XE Controller Small Network Template to deploy Converged Access. Below figure illustrates reference network design and deployment plan for single switch small branch office network.

The WorkFlow helps deploy the below features. With just a few clicks you can deploy multiple branch networks with all the wired / wireless best practices for Converged Access.

Benefits of the Converged Access WorkFlows

Compared to the traditional deployments based on manual configuration, Cisco Prime Infrastructure simplifies and automates the deployment process by providing configuration templates that can be used to deploy networks, with minimal user input.

Automated Converged Access Deployment: Cisco Prime Infrastructure simplifies converged access deployment by automating the device configuration process. Requiring only a few deployment specific inputs from the network administrator, it generates and pushes the complete converged access configurations to the network devices.

Hiding Configuration Complexity: Cisco Prime Infrastructure saves the network engineer from dealing with device CLI commands; the GUI interface requires only high level network information, which is automatically converted to CLI commands for the devices, thus hiding a lot of configuration complexity.

Automatic Inclusion of Cisco Best Practice Guidelines: The configuration templates used by Cisco Prime Infrastructure incorporates a large number of Cisco best practice guidelines, improving the deployment quality. Some of these automatically included best practice wireless technologies/features are Band-Select, Radio Resource Management (RRM), Fast SSID-Change, CleanAir, and Wireless QoS.

Error Free Deployment: The template based configuration used by Cisco Prime Infrastructure avoids manual misconfigurations making it easier to build/maintain enterprise-wide standardized configurations that are well understood across the network administrative staff. This, in turn, improves efficiency and helps reducing troubleshooting efforts.

Simultaneous Multiple Branch Deployment: one shot deployment of multiple branches is possible, leading to faster deployment.

Leveraging Common Deployment Parameters: While deploying a branch, the configuration parameters common to all branches can be exported as a CSV file, and reused later to deploy any number of additional branches, saving manual data entry efforts.

Scales to large enterprise networks: Cisco Prime Infrastructure is designed to support large enterprises with thousands of branches. It not only reduces efforts to deploy greenfield branches, but also simplifies large scale conversion of traditional Ethernet based branch networks to converged access branches in an error-free way.

Video Tutorial for Small Network Template

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