Smart License Compliance Using DNAC 2.2

hello and welcome to sdn tech forum today in this video we are going to talk about a dna center and smart license using policy the combination of two and i am going to introduce you to a new feature called smart license compliance that is available with dna center release 2.2 and above right so i in past i have made a couple of videos which talk about changing behavior of smart licenses how smart license is evolving and in this video i'm going to recap a little bit and we will start we'll take a step back we'll start with a little bit of older version that is 16 10 or 16 12 when the transport type was call home and you can use your devices to register your licenses and consume your licenses from cssm then came the spot license era where which is 17.x where you start using the transport type smart receiver and things doesn't change that much you still register reserve licenses talk to cssm and finally as you can see in this picture with 17.3 and x and above we are starting to see smart license using policy slp right so smart license using policy is taking away a lot of burden of registering your device and consuming the licenses from cssm and all those things now it is a consumption based model where you only have to report your users and you really don't need to register and all those things even better with dna center if you are a dna center customer you can use cisco dna center to fetch reports from all your network inventory that is all your switches router wlc's and dna center can actively since it is already hosting those network devices it can also go ahead and pull the license users from the devices and it can help you upload those consumption report to cssm why the reporting is important with newer uh software ios 6e and other software versions the features are getting license dependent right so you can get a lot of features new features but you need to maintain a certain level of licensing and that is why license is becoming crucial right so this is the whole thing i'm going to show you in a real demo where we will do couple of upgrade as you can see in this flowchart we are going to start with 1612. i'll show you what is the existing transport type then we'll make one upgrade what changes and then we will make a final upgrade and go to 17 3 dot x or above and see how we can manage licenses now using dna center how dna center is actually integrating with cssm and and smart license compliance workflow which is available in dna center new release 2.2 and above all right so let's go and before we actually start with demo let me show you the documentation quick start is your friend if you or otherwise you can obviously look at the configuration guide but if you are a dna center customer you can always open the quick start the beauty of quick start is it always upload the current release documentation right so you know that these are the things is already supported in your software in your release so here is manage license all table of content license manager overview this is nothing new same with respect to the older releases and i'm going to put couple of video links which i made related to smart license and license manager so if you're not aware what is smart license using policy feel free to watch those videos right then integration of cisco smart account now you can actually integrate your dna center with smart accounts so that dna center will have complete visibility of your smart accounts virtual accounts and the license deposited in that okay how to set up license manager the step by step process is mentioned here thing what i want to highlight you need to have super admin role so if you want to do a license management you need to have a super admin role otherwise some of this feature you may not be able to see by yourself visualize license you can visualize all your license related to your smart account and there is a new tab uh in compliance and we will talk about that obviously uh how to integrate all these things i'm going to show you in demo so don't worry about that okay so what is new this part upload resource utilization details to cssm this is new right with the dnac 2.2 this feature is coming that mean you dna center can fetch reports from network inventory network devices and it is going to upload it to the smart account where whichever smart account you have with the integration all right so this is about it now let's go ahead and complete the flow chart in a demo right so what i'm going to do i'm going to play a video where we are going to follow this workflow so we will start with 1612 upgrade uh verify what is changing upgrade and see what is the new behavior at 7 3 173ax and above and how you can use dna center to report licenses so that is the goal it is going to be a little bit length video so please stick to uh stay with me all right i'm going to play and make it a little bit faster okay so now you can see this is the dna center version 2.1.2 it's not even 2.2 yet so i i have not upgraded my dna center we will wait for that let's go ahead and upgrade the network device first okay so i'll pick one uh cisco catalyst 9k which is running 1612 right now okay we will mark uh 17 dot one maybe a golden image yes and we'll upgrade to that for upgrade we are relying we are going to rely on swim dna center swim feature software imaging management show license all on device itself as you can see a couple of things i want to show 1612 smart licensing is enabled license reservation i made i enabled it by myself i'm going to disable it later but thinks what you need to know is transport type was set to column okay that was the day uh back in days when you have 16 dot x uh releases 16 12 that's what this device is running right now our goal is to go ahead and upgrade it to 17.1 and see what has changed let's go and upgrade for upgrade again same swim feature this comes really handy or you can upgrade a lot of devices in one go or even if it is just one device is just couple of clicks and that is it take care of all ram one upgrade and other things so i really like this film feature and most of my network device upgrade i'm using uh dna center swing feature it is doing some running some pre-check so that make sure that you have enough flash um storage available for new image and when you activate it the image inflate a little bit so it's making sure that you have the right config register so that after reboot uh it comes back in the proper way and it has this enough space in the flash okay what i'm going to say say distribute and activate at the same time because we do know what to wait it's lab environment but if it is a production environment obviously you want to you can push the image first and then you can wait for a maintenance window to activate the image this is not related to what we are trying to achieve with smart licensing this is just the upgrade part all right i'm going to speed up is a little bit more okay i'm trying to add some custom commands it by default it has some pre and post checks inbuilt but if you want you can put some custom commands as well but let's save it for some other day okay as you can see these are the checks it is going to do pre and i'm going to say yes distribute activate checks and yes task is submitted dna center is actively trying to upgrade the box and in the task list you can see the different stages of the task distribution that means image push first and then when the image is pushed validated then it's going to switch over to the new image i have the log enabled on my dna center so on my switches so you can see what dna center is doing on my device in real time so you can see 101 is my dna center it is trying to push a new image using https and the same logs you will see here in the task progress okay my pre checks are successful then it will start distributing a distribution option okay so after 10 or 15 minutes i'm uh as you can see my dna center my image is upgraded and now i'm accessing that switch and let's look at the switch version it's 17.1 say license all transport type is column what i'm going to do i'm going to disable the network reservation for now because reservation is like air gap environment so if your network device cannot reach cssm you can use the reservation process this device can actually reach so let's cancel the reservation and go back to the eval expat state okay i think i'm searching for the command till i cancel the reservation but all the license smart licensing commands start with license smart and most of these commands are uh exactly command so i'm saying license smart reservation cancel and local because this is not a um not a cluster or h environment like it's not a stack just one single device okay no license part reservation and license you can see this is uh reservation is gone okay so this is the first iteration now upgrade to 17.3.3 which is smart license using policy all right pretty much the same operation i'm going to pull the new image mark it as golden um and then start the swing workflow that means distribute activate the new image right so i think i'm going to jump a little bit here as you can see okay so in image ripple if you don't have the image available you can actually mark it golden and pull it in the real time from your cco okay all right as you can see distribute task is in progress so dna center is actively pushing 1733 image to this box and then it is going to um activate it right and jump a little bit okay distribution is successful okay as you can see now looks like image is activated 17304 inactivate commit and now let's look at the software version software version is 17304 that is smart license using policy look at show license all when you look at show license all what is going on here is transport type has changed to type cslu right this is the default smart transport type if you are if your device is in unregistered or eval expired state okay so we have seen from call home to cslu for a device which is unregistered now time to upgrade our dna center and bring the smart license compliance workflow in picture and see what dna center is going to do with this device and you can see in real time i'm going to switch to 2224 and this upgrade is obviously going to take uh a lot of time six to eight hours easily so we are obviously we are not going to stay six to eight hours in the call that's the reason i recorded this video okay now if you are a dna customer customer you are i'm sure you are doing it pretty often it is changing the catalog once the catalog the new catalog is available it will start pulling the images and finally it will activate so for an upgrade as you can see on my screen it's a two-step process first you go ahead and update the system and then you go up only once system is updated then you are going to install new packages or upgrade the packages all right uh you can see on my screen the update process steps are mentioned now uh it went into maintenance mode i stopped the video now as you can see my version is updated from two one two four to two to four so now we are in the new release right let's go and check what happened all my updates are completed now we are going to do the smart account integration so first you go to smart account and i'm let's go slowly here okay first you go to smart account and then you put your smart account virtual account and you are going to register dna center to that smart account dna center essentially do not need any licenses but you still need to deter it with your smart account so that it knows that where to upload the inventory details reports right and it can also use it use that smart account for any pnp redirection so that is very important and this is the new workflow which is available in all licenses now so i'm connected to my smart account i can see all licenses available and finally the report and compliance you can see this is the new workflow smart license compliance this is the new workflow available and if i go to recent task as i upgraded my dna center what dna center has done it has identified all the inventory and wherever the smart transport type was cslu or unregistered it went ahead and shut down that transport type and it changed the transport type to off so that is the new behavior that mean you really do not need a transport type smart receiver or call home or anything to each device you can actually use dna center to report the licenses and this is what we are validating here uh am i going really fast here no okay transport type cslu okay that's for my rtp this box because for some reason dna center doesn't know how to reach this all right so the final workflow we are going to do live so let me pause the video here what we will do we will first log into the dna center okay this is the final and very important part the new new new part okay if you are okay let's go to system settings smart account my smart account it's already registered sorry about this zooming smart licenses i have already tethered my smart account and virginia virtual account and dna center should show registered sometime it fall back to unregistered but don't worry you can go ahead and register it again okay so let's do that once it is registered we are going to see how we can use dna center so it is registered today ssm connection mode it's not required let's go to tools license manager here i have the overview how many licenses i have and who all are using that all licenses you have seen this tab before it is it has all my inventory here and what licenses they are using how many are compliant how many out of compliance all those information is available here right the new tab is report and compliance within report and complies the new workflow is available smart license compliance and this is the dna center reporting workflow okay so uh first let's relate the recent task as you can as i mentioned before once you upgraded your dna center to 2 2 4 what dna center has done it has detected all the tn device inventory and wherever the device was unregistered it actually went ahead and sent the transport type to off so the new transport type is set to off change transport type is initiated on one device let's validate so that you know that what i am talking here let me log into that this device this is c4331 and see what is the transport type i think there is a little bit latency here okay show license all as you can see the new transport type the journey from call home to smart receiver to cslu and now off right let's enable terminal monitor because we are going to perform the workflow we are going to ask dna center to start sending the licenses okay so let me kill this click on smart license compliance workflow let's do it yes select your account say next choose your device okay if your device inventory doesn't show up here as a part of smart license compliance make sure you have net confinable and in worst case you have to do a discovery of your device using netconf but that is strictly my personal experience this is not coming from cisco documentation all right modify policy this is my reporting interval you can go ahead and modify your reporting policy maybe 30 days report every month you can change and this is in days right but let's i'll i'm going to keep it as is here this is the very important page device name you can install the authentication code you can enable the throughput licenses uh i uh isr csrs where your throughput is limited to using licenses you can enable new license hx status and all those things here right but we are not going to install any additional licenses so let's go ahead and say next and next so you can see the complete detail here fetching uses report right user's report collected is in progress then once user's report is fetched uploading uses report that means dna center is report is collected from device successfully what is the next step uploading users report and that is the reason we have registered this dna center to our smart account right so dna center in southbound has fetched the reports from device inventory and now it is trying to upload the report in the northbound direction right to cssm uses report generation upload can take some time given how many number of devices you have for us it's just one report and what is your internet connectivity look like it may take a little bit longer some time so be patient with that and finally cssm is going to uh give acknowledgement which dna center is going to push it back to devices so that devices know that yes i have reported my license and they will start a timer and after 90 days again it will upload okay let's see what is happening on device itself since we have the log enable right let's see if we can find something meaningful here yes this is copy boot flash and image cli accounting license smart save uses unreported file so license uses file is indicated as dot rom so this is the file dna center created on my device and now it is trying to copy it back to cssm so this is the license usersreport.com some random numbers users consumption reported uploaded to cisco csm clown waiting for acknowledgement as i mentioned it may take a little bit longer i think i'm going to pause the video or maybe once we have the acknowledgement available i'm going to paste a screenshot at the very end of this video but as you can see things are going smooth i can manage my licenses using dna center once this is complete you can simply finish the workflow and get out of it okay what else you can do here other than waiting i wish we could be able to complete it pretty quickly but that's not happening so i think you got the idea right and in the final screen i am going to definitely post the provision and acknowledgement screenshot so you know that we finished the workflow for sure and let's take a step back yeah you have seen the journey from 16 dot sun 16.10 to 17.5 or 6 which is whatever is available now and how smart licensing is changing or evolving and how you can now use your dna center to take off some some of the load from network devices itself and not maintain a do not they don't have to reach out to cssm directly you may not have to maintain a satellite on-prem satellite server to just report licenses and other things everything is now inbuilt in dna center so feel free to go ahead and utilize this feature and take the full advantage of dna center so thank you for watching if you have any questions please feel free to put that in comment section and i'll make sure i'll get back to you thank you very much for watching okay as you can see uh before i actually finish this video my up upload users report is completed and now we are provisioning the acknowledgement so it was not a very long wait okay provision uses conceptually put acknowledgement to the device let's check on device what's going on with the devices here okay see like hunting license smart import boot flash okay as you can see rum acknowledgement has been received from dna center so dna center has received this acknowledgement from cssm and is push that acknowledgement to the device itself sip services of license report acknowledgement license enforcement is coming so please be aware of that again this is all my personal view and not coming from cisco documentation show license all see the after effect of that my transport type is still off but what is happening here is uses reporting last acknowledgement received few minutes ago and next acknowledgement is due okay policy is in use and report on change 90 days reporting push interval next acquisition interval all these things you can just see here okay cross code install okay so that mean we are we actively reported the users and now we have all the features available so this is it for now thank you for watching

Channel: SDN TechForum

Views: 176

Keywords: Networking, sdntechforum, monitoring, cisco

Id: raTWujOVLIQ

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021