Cisco 9800-L Wireless Controller Overview and Setup

here it is this is the catalyst 9800 l series wireless controller from cisco and guys just like i do all the time on this channel i want to give you guys a really good overview of what this box is what it's replacing what it can do show you guys all the physical connectivity that's on it on the front and on the back and then take you through setting this thing up out of the box so you get out of the box plugging it in i want to be able to get an access point associated to it i want to get some clients running on this box and show you guys how easy this setup actually is of this thing i'm also going to talk about a couple things that i found we'll call it interesting maybe some not very well documented features or Cork's of the box so you're gonna want to pay attention to those while you're setting this thing up and let's jump to it okay so guys let's talk a little bit about this box what is it and what can it do so this box is actually replacing or i guess the next controller in line on that a little small form-factor what else land controllers that Cisco's had out for a really long time so we have the 2504 we had the 3504 and this is kind of the next generation of those being 9800 l it's been beefed up a little bit here so it's gonna be able to do 250 access points now your s gonna be able to have 5,000 clients on this thing and the throughput is up to five gigabits per second on this if you guys kind of heard me mention in the beginning of this video it's a catalyst waterless land controller now and it's a catalyst wireless LAN controller because it no longer runs air OS software anymore so these are the first generation of stand-alone controllers that are actually running iOS software on them so it was really nice setting this thing up and getting it out of the box and when I got to the CLI configuration of it I knew I know what to do straight out of the box because it's all iOS based commands so if you ever set up a Cisco switch or a Cisco router before getting into a turn figure what's going on is super super simple so I'm really glad that we finally standardize on that iOS software code across multiple platforms now because it makes my job a lot easier this thing just like a lot of the other catalyst 9000 series switches we have some of 93 hundreds and above this can do encrypted traffic analytics so what that is is if there's a user's PC that's misbehaving and they may have some piece of malware or something on it and that traffic is going through my wireless I could actually take a look at that traffic without decrypting it send it over to stealthWatch and stealthWatch can tell me that hey you may have some malicious behavior on your wireless network it looks like this host has been compromised so this box fully falls in line with that the encrypted traffic analytics event has been huge on the catalyst 9300 series switches that we've been selling so again awesome that cisco put that this in here a really great feature this controller is also SD access compatible so if you guys are thinking about doing soft defined access on your land you can add the controller in here and it'll be part of your fabric if you're not ready for software to find access yet then you can still run this thing in traditional Wireless mode cap webmo tunnel of traffic through this thing if you guys why - you know nothing changes from the old behavior to the to the new behavior here we can do high availability so this thing does have a service port on it you could hook up another 9800 series controller next to it and you can do high availability with it and then the last thing on here that I thought was was worth mentioning is hot patches so since I have iOS code on here if there's a software update that comes out I need to load something in here new let's say it's a new access point model that we just came out with I don't have to upgrade this entire box I can just load a hot patch and now the new you know 9000 x access point is gonna work on here without having even reboot to control or anything like that I will mention before we get into showing you guys the physical ports and everything on this that there is no longer power over ethernet on this box so you guys might remember the p OE feature from the 2500 and 3500 Cisco did away with that with this box and at first I was like oh no I don't know if that's the right idea but getting into this box a little bit more understanding the roadmap or Cisco's going I'm okay with it and I'm okay with it because we have that mobility Express solution now on our access points so for a small network where traditionally I would just plug them into the controller here I don't even need a controller anymore I can just have three or four access points out at a remote office and one of the access points can actually act as the controller that's that mobility Express solution there so knowing that we have that I don't have to go and say well you want four five access points in there you really should look at a controller out there you don't need this anymore for those really small networks you just need the mobility Express solution so with that let's get into the the ports and we'll talk about those a little bit so first we'll start on the power supply side of this thing nothing really too crazy on this side just the Kensington lock cutout right there and then you've got the power connector right here so that's really it nothing on nothing really on the side just a bunch of ventilation holes and that's kind of it now I'm gonna flip it and we're gonna take a look at the port side okay so let's take a look at the port side of this box and we'll go over everything that that's on here so starting on this side over here we've got the reset button pretty standard on these small form-factor boxes hold it down for 10 seconds while the things booted and you'll get a factory reset of the box next to that you've got your traditional power on status light there so once that's plugged in and everything you'll see that go green next to that we have a little bell and this is an alarm bell telling you that you got that you guys have a fault or a hardware issue going on with the box and next to that is your redundancy port light so that'll light up when the box is in high availability mode and you've got another wireless LAN controller plugged into the RP port okay so first kind of quirk of this box or unknot very well-documented feature we'll call it is this little bell here actually lights up red when you plug the box in for the first time if you don't have your uplink ports these two ports here plugged in so I guess the reasoning for that is it's it's telling you that hey you've got a fault because you don't have your two uplink plugged in but if you're not using these uplink ports because you're using these other four ports over here your lights gonna be red you can go in and disable those ports and get rid of that but you know me not really knowing much about this box I thought I had a bad box out of the out of box because I'm looking at this thing saying okay well I've got a red warning light on and I haven't even done anything yet so guys just watch out for that it doesn't mean you have a bad box it just means that your up links aren't plugged in next we have our four Ethernet ports here and these are M gig ports a littles multi gigabit ethernet ports and they'll do up to two and a half gigs again like I mentioned before no power over ethernet on this so they're just regular rj45 data ports next to that these are my 210 gig uplink ports now I've got this box that's copper there is another flavor of this box that comes in where these can be SFP ports so if you don't have ten gig copper you can get the SFP version of this and you can run fiber with SFPs between this box and your in your core you can do that or if you just have a really long run and you need fiber you know you have you've got that uplink option right there next to that we have the USB port that's your traditional USB port for doing software upgrades so you could put up a piece of software on a thumb drive pop it in there go into the CLI load it right off the the USB stick in there next to that we have the console ports you've got your traditional old-school console port at the top and then you've got your micro USB port on the bottom that's pretty cool is the first time I've seen Cisco actually use a micro USB port traditionally I spend the mini USB port so they finally went over to the micro USB port on that and one other interesting fact on these two ports here was reading some of the documentation is that only one of these ports is active at any given time and if you have something plugged into the mic USB port that takes precedence over the top cable here so just watch out for that if you've got this thing cabled up differently or you got both of these things plugged in only one is gonna be active at any given time next to that we have the service port at the top so that is actually your out-of-band management port and then under that we have your RP port and again that's for your redundancy port if you did have it if you didn't want to run this in high availability you put another controller next to it you connect these two together and you've got high availability on this so with that we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna power on this box and I'm gonna show you guys how to get this thing configured now when you power on this box here's the here's the second kind of quirk or undocumented feature it is loud and the fan on this thing blasts at I guess a hundred percent all the time so when I originally got this thing I had that red warning light on and the fans going crazy you know again I thought ok is my box a do a shower made this thing but that's the way this thing was designed so it needs I guess all that cooling in here you know typically these smaller boxes if they have fans at all are really light and you barely hear them this thing you're gonna hear so you probably want to put it in a rack somewhere you probably wanna put it behind closed doors you're not gonna wanna put it under your your PC or anything like that so I'll plug it in and let you guys listen to the fan hopefully it comes through ok on the microphone but just again word of caution something to watch out for alright so before we get into the configuration just figure I'd show you guys the fan and this thing spinning so I'm about a foot away from the microphone and I've got the controller about a foot away from the microphone on the table here so you know I don't know how well it's coming through on the mic but it is fairly loud you know it depends on your definition of loud but it does make some noise it's not gonna be super whisper quiet or anything like that you can also see here I don't have anything plugged in right now to any of these ports and I that little red Bell warning light that's active so again don't worry about it it's a little bit noisy and you get that Bell but again let me show you guys how to shut that Bell off at least okay guys so to start configuring this controller out of the box you have to start in the CLI I I looked around I try to figure out a way if there you can just go straight into the GUI and there's not really a way to do that you need to start in the CLI there's only a couple things you need to do in here and then we can transition directly over the GUI so when you plug it in console into this box you're gonna get the initial configuration dialog pop up here and we just need to say yes I'm gonna go through here would you like the basic management setup yes we would enter the host name on the wireless LAN controller we'll call it test double you'll see for time being here naval sit a secret putting your super-secret passwords here and would you like to set up account for accessing HTTP server so you guys need to say yes to this because this basically allows us to GUI in to the box so you need to set up the box as an HTTP server so we're gonna say yes to that username admin find for me password Cisco fine for me you change these obviously if you want and I recommend you change them but for testing purposes I'm gonna leave them the same SNMP right now I'm not gonna configure that so we're gonna skip over that and then you know here's here's well as interesting points that you got to configure in here as well so right now it's asking so what management network do you want to use from the above interfaces so what I'm gonna select and the way that I have my box plugged in right now is I have one port my out-of-band management port or that service port plugged in directly to my laptop and that's actually Gigabit Ethernet zero here and I'm gonna use that for my initial configuration of my initial out-of-band management so I'm gonna put in right now put in the Gigabit Ethernet 0 port and you have to type this all in you can't just do gig you know tab or whatever it won't pop in for you so you have to put Gigabit Ethernet 0 or whatever interface when I can figure on it and then you need to configure an IP address for it so that way you guys can actually plug in and we're gonna say yes we want to configure the IP address and pop that in real quick 45 will go with subnet mask we're just gonna leave it slash 24 and it builds out the initial configuration for you shows you the quick summary of what you did and then you can press 2 to save the configuration and we're gonna do that and that's it we're into the box so from here we're pretty much done with getting into the CLI I might come back here to show you guys a couple things but if getting the initial setup of this box you're you're done so now we could transition over to the GUI and show you guys what that looks like okay so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to log into this thing via the GUI so I'm gonna go into my LAN settings and I'm just gonna set a static IP address here on the same subnet to 168 40.3 we'll call it and we'll hit apply and now we'll try to HT to http into our box here 40.5 and typical security warning advanced proceed and we log into our box for the GUI and men cisco is our password for testing purposes and now we can go through the what they call Express setup I would have thought Express setup means plug-in and you get this page originally but this is say step two of the Express setup and go in here and you could add in some of your information so we're gonna do stand alone for right now I'm not gonna worry about high availability at this point date and time if you want to put an NTP server in here you can put an NTP server in here service port that is our auto band management port we set that in the CLI and then we need to come down here and we need to set our wireless management settings so guys in arrow s this is the AP manager so this is basically how the access point is gonna communicate with our controller over what port and everything so right now I'm I've plugged in my box using the 0/0 port port 0 on the front of the box and that goes to my switch now on my switch I have DHCP set up I've got my default gateways all set up so what we're gonna be doing is just dumping traffic from the access point onto the switch from this point this port here so I'm gonna select that again because that's the port that I have from my controller to my switch we need to designate a IP address for this so we're gonna use 182 168 55 we'll use on this guy actually we use a different one I think I use five up already it's something else and two five five two point five zero five zero and I'm gonna put the V line number in here too so we're gonna have this running on VLAN 1 put our default gateway the two and that's it that's all we need in here to get this thing initially set up we're gonna hit next and we're going to create our first wireless network we're gonna say yep it's wpa2 personal you also have your Enterprise options you're gonna be using 802 dot 1 X and the radius server but for just to keep this thing easy I'm just can use a pre-shared key I'm gonna call it test SSID and pre-shared key let's just go one two three and you can do a little eyeball thing there and I'll tell you what the password was what you're typing it there we're gonna go ahead and click Add click Next and here's some kind of Advanced Settings you could do here so we can just do typical client density if you wanted to I'm not gonna go too much in depth on what this does there's a lot of new features in this controller too and it looks a little bit different than arrow watts there's a concept of profiles and tags and all that I'm not gonna get into that maybe I'll make a more advanced video but the real purpose of this video guys here is just to show you guys how to get this thing up and running get an SSID on it and get clients associated to it you know these little wind just to get you guys going and then you can start looking into this thing start reading more documentation on ok how should I be setting this thing off what should I be doing with this we're going to set it for data and voice too little traffic we've got that virtual IP address in here that hasn't really chain that's just for you know things like the splash page pops up when if a guest comes in things like that we'll use that virtual IP address and we're gonna just say summary on this you can take a look again at the settings we made there's our test SSID Advanced Settings and we're gonna go ahead and hit finish here are you sure you want to proceed yes now I'm gonna go and plug my access point in and let this thing do its thing for a second here and we'll take a look again and we'll log right back in okay so guys I just plugged my access point in and the way that I have this set up is I have my access point and controller on the same layer two subnet so the AP could find the controller very easily if you guys don't have that situation and you've got your access point on a different subnet you can use DNS you can use DHCP options so that way the X point knows where the AP manager addresses to find the actual controller so we can log in here first and we could take a look to make sure that the AP was actually associated to the controller and we see the brand new iOS GUI here and we can see that our access point is there so you know at this point I should be able to join my network that I've created and you take a look at my wireless settings here I've got my test SSID go ahead and click that and it tells me cannot be joined hmm okay so this is one of those things that I ran into after initially configured this and kind of banged my head against a wall little pins like well why isn't this working and what I figured out is I had to come in here under configuration go to policy and again guys this is a lot different than the way that air OS worked and everything just the way that the screens are click on your default policy you know we can I'll make an advance video maybe talking about policies profiles tags you know all that stuff and how this stuff works but basically we need to go in here under access policies and for some reason I don't know again if this is a bog maybe I'm doing something wrong but when we put in there to use VLAN one what actually got put in here is VLAN zero zero zero one so it's using a VLAN name for some reason I'm not really sure why I can either click this and hit the default which actually will call the default profile for this which if you look at a default profile for it'll say VLAN one or you can just type in one it really doesn't matter again I'm not going to go too much in depth on into that I want to try to make this video as short as possible and hit apply update there so now that's getting applied and if we try to go to our test SSID again you should be able to associate to it and we'll give it a second and we are on it now we'll test our favorite websites here goatees yahoo and we are up and running and one last thing I'm gonna show you guys inside the GUI here is just on the licensing side of things let's get this work in here too so if we go over to administration licensing this is all smart licensing so you guys need to make sure you have your smart licensing portal working and we're gonna go in here and we're gonna configure this so I need to actually go to software that's Cisco comm and create a token here so if you go here and we're gonna go over to smart licensing login here and I am gonna go ahead and create a new token and Maxim refuses we're gonna put one here and this token is what's actually gonna link the wireless LAN controller to Cisco smart licensing so I have that here I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna copy the token we're gonna go back to our licensing page here and we're gonna set my source interface so the only interface I have plugged in that's got capabilities are getting to the Internet is at TW zero zero zero interface and I it needs a I P address for DNS I mean you can put in your your DNS ah IP address here or I just use Google I'm lazy I guess and we'll hit next next pop the token in and finish this might take a couple minutes I don't know to go through ok and then guys once this comes back up give it a min and you could hit this reload button it at the top there and eventually they'll say you know registered tomorrow lacing enabled you know all that and then the last thing I'm going to show to you guys is that red warning light on the box and what it what it looks like and why it's actually coming on so if we do a command here the show command for the alarm status they'll actually tell us that severity is critical because these two links are down so that's the reason that we're getting an alarm status that's on there so guys I hope you enjoyed this video as always please if you're not a subscriber subscribe to the video if you like what I'm doing here give me a thumbs up and if you guys have any other questions want to talk about something post it in the comments below and I'll try to get back to you guys as soon as possible thanks a lot

Channel: Cisco Sal

Views: 33,490

Rating: 4.9348269 out of 5

Keywords: 9800-L, catalyst, Catylst 9800, Cisco wireless, 9100 wireless, 3504, 2504, Cisco 9800-L, Aruba, Meraki, HPE, HP, Mist wireless, myst wireless

Id: UhZedbZ1pIA

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019