Cisco Catalyst 9800-CL Deployment

hi everybody you're probably wondering what can you do to make your W land controllers a little bit more resilient more redundant right without having to be limited by the physical limitations of the Cisco W land controllers well cisco has released the the new iOS XE based W LAN controllers while there are physical versions of that wln controller what's more noticeable is that there is a Cisco 9800 W gland controller for the cloud which means you can install that on AWS possibly Azure or any other cloud but also means we can install this controller in our VMware ESXi environments and so that's what this video is going to show you is how to install that in ESXi and so the first thing that we have to do here is really download the the controller and so what we're going to use is the OVA file from cisco comm so here you can see the link that I'm using but I'll have that link down below in the show notes so you can download this as well but here you'll find that the suggested release is Gibraltar 6.11 dot 1c which is just based on this recording at the time and you scroll down here and you could find the OVA file that is the file that we're going to need to import into VMware ESXi and so go ahead and download that file and save it to your desktop you do need a login to download this file you just need to create a what's called a CCO account and then search for the 9800 CL so before we get into that this is an OVA file an OVA file is something you use to import into VMware and because I don't have V Center I'm using VMware ESXi which if you're interested VMware ESXi for me and my lab is installed on an Intel look it's an i7 with 32 gigabytes of RAM so in order for us to import this OVA file without using V Center because I have the license to run vCenter we're going to use something called the OVF tool from vmware so here's another link you should keep track of right up here at the top I'll also include this down in the description of the video and so you just download the open virtual format tool that is correct for your operating system in this case I'm using Mac OS 10 and before we start importing this OVA file I wanted to show you what my VMware environment looks like so you can see here as i zoom in just a little bit I'm using version 6.70 currently these are the virtual machines I have installed you can see that I have and I have deployed the catalyst 9800 previously and this is where the OVA file is going to deploy the controller but prior to that I do have some networking already set up so here I have four networks we're really going to use three because two of these are on the same VLAN and so we're going to attach this network here and for a lab wireless and VM network so you can see that they are VLAN 140 120 and the one that's that's labeled VLAN 4 0 9 5 is really my trunk port so that's what I'm using to trunk to my controller and so what are we gonna do next now we're going to take the OVA file after it's been downloaded I have it saved to my desktop and we're now going to take that file and import it using the OVF tool into my vmware esxi environment so we head out here to my command-line interface the first thing you're going to need to do I'm gonna try to run through this a little quick but I will have a blog post and a link to where you can find the what to put into this file but we're first going to create the OVF tool file and this is the format you need to put it in so I'm using VI here so VI dot OVF tool and i've already created this file ahead of time so these are the contents of the file we're going to accept all EULA's this is a data store in which I'm putting the the VM into and the deployment option now this is interesting to line because this has to be with the type of VM that you're deploying right well what is the scale of your WLAN controller and so there's three different kinds you have your your for CPU eight CPU or no sixty PU and ten CPU so that's a small medium and large deployment and just in this lab scenario because I have an Intel nook I don't have a really powerful VMware host I'm going to pick the four virtual CPU version with eight gigabytes of RAM so that's what that means here and so if you go back to the file there's the deployment option for CPU eight gigabytes that just means I can support about a max thousand access points and ten thousand clients that are supported and so that's gonna be a pretty big VM and WLAN controller already and if you're wondering if this supports vMotion v-neck tee teaming not yet maybe coming in to a future version of the controller so here is the name that I'm giving my WLAN controller and remember I showed you those three networks these are the networks that I'm basically binding to these Ethernet Gigabit Ethernet interfaces of the WLAN controller and here's the hostname that I want to give it and so what we do next is we actually run the OVF tool which is going to call out to this oviya OVA file I have on my desktop and use this OVF tool file to import that into vmware so let's take a look at that I already have the command written out here so we're going to run the OVF tool which is in my Applications folder from when I installed it and then I'm gonna say you're gonna import this OVA file right here and so I'm using the 1610 version and then we're going to tell it to log in as root on this VMware server that is the IP address of my VMware host so we go ahead and hit enter here and it's going to open the OVA source the actual file we downloaded and then it's gonna ask me for my password for the root login and so I'm gonna type that in there if I can remember what that is so there we go it's opening the the connection to VMware now and so now it's going to deploy the actual OVA templates gonna import it and you're gonna see that this progress is gonna start increasing so if we go back to to the to the VMware host here just go down to virtual machines we're gonna see that there's is this new VM that's being deployed lab - 9800 WL see that is the name that I gave that VMware host I mean the VM and you can see here is the import v-app down at the bottom and it's still progressing there so we're gonna wait until this until this import process completes and then we will move forward into the actual configuration of the W LAN controller so there we go it is now complete the transfers there there are no errors if we go back to my VMware screen you can tell it is complete there so what we're gonna do now is start this virtual machine and then we're going to console into it via the built-in console of VMware so let's go ahead and do that and see what we get so we'll power that on there I'll click on console here at the top and I'll just open it in a browser window here so it this is a console directly through the browser and we can see that the WLAN controller is booting up it's asking to press any key to continue if you don't it'll just continue to to do the boot process so we'll wait for the controller to boot up here so as this controller is booting up do you want to talk about why you would want to deploy a controller in a cloud or virtual environment well the the new iOS XE based WLAN controller does come with a lot of features very similar to the the physical version of these controllers now it's not a hundred percent feature parity but it's pretty darn close and so here it is where we're going to boot off of an image here so what I find most really interesting here is you don't have to maintain physical controllers anymore with this deployment a lot of environments are not that complex when it comes to wireless but they need they do need some of those advanced features and this gets you get you there with the features you need if you're used to the cisco WLAN controller now this is different from what we're used to with cisco controllers where they're air OS base this one is iOS XE base if you've ever used iOS before and I'm sure you have when you're using a Cisco switch for example or a Cisco router the controller in the cloud gives us that more resilient write more of high availability because of the cloud environment and since everyone's moving off to the cloud this is where we want to put everything right all your servers are gonna be in infrastructure that you can control in a better fashion right with with backups with redundancy moving VMs to new environments so if this this controller needed more power more resources you can easily give it more resources right we deployed it in a in a small scale maybe that means you can move it to a medium scale when you get there or if you think of having it in the cloud the cloud then you don't have to maintain those resources in the cloud any longer a different different team handles that somebody else's computer is what you're running it on and you don't have to deal with physical infrastructure so let's go back here to the insulation because now we're getting the system configuration dialog here so now if we hit enter we're gonna get the would you like to enter the initial configuration dialog this is a very familiar setup if you're used to configuring Cisco routers and switches and so I do not want to go into initial configuration and so here we're starting to go into the actual configuration of the controller itself so yes we are going to terminate the auto install if whatever you see in the bracket there is the default and so now we're gonna get started here a lot more log messages are going to show up and you see this WLC prompt here right and let me see if I can zoom in just a little bit so you guys have a look I'm in console mode let me try to zoom in here alright hopefully you guys can see that a little bit better so now we're going to go into the configuration of the controller itself we're going to hit an able write and then config T I'm sure you guys are familiar with that and we're gonna go into the first interface here now what we're gonna hit is no switch port and we're gonna assign an IP address to this port here this is an IP I have available on my infrastructure and I just want to confirm that right so let's see here want to make sure that yep there is no other host on that using that IP address and I do want to keep that running so we can check up on that later now even though the interface is up as you can see that I've configured an IP address but I'm still not able to ping the controller and that's because we have to add a gateway so we're this is like a router guys so we're going to configure the gateway here and so hopefully that gives us connectivity and there it is so I can ping the actual controller now the virtual controller but we're not done yet we're going to set up a user account I'm going to call it admin give it a privilege of 15 and I'm gonna give it a super secret password right you would use a stronger password in your environment this is just a lab so we're gonna configure that there and now what I want to do is actually try to see if I can log into the controller and do what's called a zero-day provisioning i'll cancel that pain cuz i don't need that so let's try to get there we'll go to the IP address that I gave it oh and we get this this potential security risk right because the certificate is not trusted so we'll just accept that risk and continue so there we go we have we now have the login screen right from this login screen we can use the credentials that I have configured with password 1 2 3 4 as a password I'm not gonna save this right now with my 1 password I don't need to all right I finally got to log in here and get rid of this password issue that I was having I don't know what I was doing typing it in wrong but now once I've logged in here with this configuration setup we're gonna go through the zero-day configuration and so your deployment mode here are your options you got a stamina load and active or standby so these would these bottom two would be if you've got redundant controllers but we're only installing this single instance so you saw properly stuff your country code put in your date and time zone if you have any ntp server so I'll just type this in here my ntp server is that my gateway if we scroll down here will now see some more settings that we can configure for this controller and so here is where I'm going to select my wireless management settings so this was the second interface that we had configured previously and I'm gonna say what VLAN it's on right so this is the interface for managing the actual controller and so now I'm going to set a IP address for my controller here make sure I type that in properly there we go and we make sure I want to set up a gateway as well and there we go we don't need to set up a management VLAN DHCP server at the moment so what I'm gonna do is click Next and here we're gonna configure our wireless networks so here we can add a few and I'll just call this guest and we'll say there's a guest Network type I can do a web bath or off by off bypass whatever you want to set up here we'll just add that in there then we'll add a network here I'll call it CTS for the clear to send podcast and you can select your wpa2 Enterprise or your wpa2 personal here we're just gonna use personal and I'm gonna call this just San Jose alright that's my password my super secure password pre-shared key well go now it doesn't like that because I didn't add the right length okay so we'll just type something in there that will make sense and we'll add there you go we've got two wireless networks okay so now we're gonna hit next if you're done configuring all the wireless networks you need now this is just your configuration setup so you can go back in to here and configure everything you need you don't even have to set this up for in this configuration wizard once you fully configure the controller you can actually get in there and configure everything you need so now we're here with some advanced settings and some of the things I would change here is the RF group name right so I'm gonna call that CTS for clear - CIN this is our traffic type and the virtual IP address you're gonna want to select one that is not used and also it is a private IP address you don't want to use one dot one dot one dot one the reason why is that one dot one dot one dot one is now a public routable IP address so please do not use that IP address for your virtual IP address in your WLAN controller all right so we come down here to AP certificate and you will want to make sure this is yes for generate certificate and the reason is that this self signed certificate of the controller is going to be needed so that an AP can join or associate to this w line controller select your key size I'd suggest selecting a stronger one you can set up your your password here I'll just type something in just to keep this going then you click on summary and you can review the settings that you've configured right make sure everything is correct here otherwise you can go back and and configure everything again but you do want to make sure your your management settings are correct so you can get into your controller so we're gonna hit finish here and do you know what's gonna happen at this point it is actually going to apply the configuration and will be a logged out and be asked to log back in so we'll click on yes and we'll wait for that to complete once that configuration is applied the WLAN controller is going to act like any other physical WLAN controller other than the only difference is that it's now a virtual label and controller that we have running in VMware ESXi so we have all the benefits of running a virtual machine other than some of the limitations that cisco has put on us like we can't do vMotion yet I'm pretty sure that it'll come down in a future release I sure hope so because that's some of the benefits we'll want to use when we're using the virtual machine and VMware right so here we are we are logged out of the controller now so we'll log back in and hopefully I'll get my password correct here and I will not because I have a poor memory so there we go we're logging into the controller and there it is guys we have successfully installed a WLAN controller the iOS XC version on VMware ESXi so now here you can you can do a lot configuration configure everything you want here with a controller you can monitor everything on this controller it's it almost looks like a router to be honest because you're running iOS XC underneath but you also have the command-line interface we have I was trying to click on licensing here to see what kind of license we have and you're gonna use this trial version you do want to install the correct license as you can see I have no licenses in use or you can go ahead and register this automatically so hopefully that wasn't too complex of an installation I think the hardest part was just using the OVF tool which was command-line based and then that imports the OVA into VMware ESXi then that's when you go into VMware ESXi launch the console and configure your basic settings for your WLAN controller so you can access the management interface of your W LAN controller

Channel: Rowell Dionicio

Views: 9,207

Keywords: cisco, wireless, c9800, wifi

Id: e4HlJ0nk_Cg

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 14 2019