Initial startup of a network involves distinct network planning, provisioning and validation phases. With the manual approach to these processes that has been prevalent to date, network operators have been forced to spend less time planning and more time performing tedious configuration and validation tasks.

Automating these tasks would deliver immediate benefits, including:

• Faster initial setup: Reducing the time needed to get infrastructure ready for the applications
• Fewer errors: Eliminating manual processes with well planned network blueprints
• Repeatability: Leveraging automation tools and scripts across multiple deployments

Network startup is a complex process involving numerous configuration and validation steps. The following is an abridged example of the configuration steps necessary to deploy a new network. The whole process could take multiple days extending to weeks, depending on the size and complexity of the network. In this example there are 100 nodes.

Infrastructure Setup (x1):

• Start-up and configure DHCP infrastructure
• Optional: Configure and enable infrastructure services, such as AAA servers, SNMP servers, syslog server

Switch Deployment (x 100):

• Physical Installation:

  • Rack the switch
  • Connect management (in-band or out-of-band) interfaces
  • Optional: connect a console connection to a terminal server
  • Power up the switch

• Switch Configuration:

  • Configure management parameters on the switch
  • Validate management connectivity
  • Validate if the right image exists on the switch
  • Upgrade/downgrade the image, as needed
  • Configure AAA parameters
  • Validate AAA and user access
  • Configure infrastructure features such as SNMP, syslog
  • Validate infrastructure features
  • Configure fabric interfaces with appropriate VLANs or IP addresses
  • Validate connectivity to adjacent switches
  • Configure connectivity to external / default routers
  • Validate connectivity to external / core networks
  • Configure connectivity to the Layer 4-7 service devices
  • Validate Layer 4-7 service connectivity
  • Configure Layer 2/3 interfaces and protocols
  • Validate protocol reachability
  • Install configuration agents (such as Puppet, Chef, Splunk forwarder)

Fabric Wide (x1):

• Validate node-to-node and end-to-end connectivity

The problem with this manual configuration exercise is each of the configuration steps above must be done by hand - 100 times - which is extremely time-consuming and error-prone.