Network Plug and Play

Introduction

Enterprises and campus deployments incur major costs to install and deploy the large number of networking devices that go into their data center, branch networks and campus rollout. Typically, every device has to be pre-staged by a skilled installer and loaded, through a console connection, with a CLI configuration that allows it to connect to the rest of the network. This process is costly, time consuming, and error-prone. At the same time, customers would like to increase the speed and reduce complexity of the deployment without compromising the security.

The Cisco Network Plug and Play solution provides a simple, secure, unified, and integrated offering for enterprise network customers to ease new branch or campus device rollouts or for provisioning updates to an existing network. The solution provides a unified approach to provision enterprise networks comprised of Cisco routers, switches, and wireless devices with a near zero touch deployment experience.

It reduces the burden on enterprises by greatly simplifying the process of deploying new devices. An installer at the site can deploy a new device without any CLI knowledge, while a network administrator centrally manages device configuration.

Key Components

The Cisco Network Plug and Play solution includes the following components:

PnP Agent: This agent is embedded in Cisco devices and communicates to the Cisco Network Plug and Play application using the open plug and play protocol over HTTPS during device deployments.The PnP Agent, using DHCP, DNS or other such methods, tries to acquire the IP address of the PnP server with which it wants to communicate. After a server is found and a connection has been established, the agent communicates with the PnP server to perform deployment-related activities.

PnP Server: The Cisco Plug and Play (PnP) server is a central server that encodes the logic of managing and distributing deployment information (images and configurations) for the devices being deployed. PnP Server communicates with the PnP agent on the device using PnP protocol. Cisco APIC-EM is Cisco’s SDN Controller for Enterprise Networks (Access, Campus, WAN, and Wireless). The platform hosts multiple applications (SDN apps) that use open Northbound REST APIs that drive core network automation solutions. The platform also supports a number of south-bound protocols that enable it to communicate with the breadth of network devices that customers already have in place, and extend SDN benefits to both greenfield and brownfield environments.

PnP Protocol: PnP Protocol defines the transport bindings and schemas for various messages that get exchanged between the PnP Agent and PnP Server over HTTPS.

PnP Helper App: Mobile application for iOS and Android devices that helps configure Cisco devices with a bootstrap configuration and triggers remote branch deployments. The app communicates with the Cisco Network Plug and Play application over 3G/4G/WiFi connections to get the predefined device bootstrap configuration, and delivers it to a Cisco network device by using a special serial cable that is physically connected to the device.

Plug N Play Connect: Optional cloud component for automatic PNP server discovery if the DHCP or DNS methods are not available. The PNP Server is the backend part of the Cisco Network Plug and Play application in the APIC-EM. The Cisco network device contacts the Cisco Plug and Play Connect cloud service at devicehelper.cisco.com to obtain the IP address of the appropriate PNP server that is defined for your organization. Learn more about PnP Connect here.