An Introduction to Wired Assurance

Hello and welcome to this series on MIST Wired Assurance AI for the wired network.
My name is Abhi Shamsundar.
I’m the Product Manager at MIST for all things Juniper MIST and integration.
I’m happy to be here talking about this video series about Wired Assurance.
And this introductory video will focus on why Wired Assurance.
What does this video series encompass’
And how do we bring all of this together in the form of a course series for you.
I hope you enjoy these video series.
Wired Assurance is one of our ways for us to say we can help you automate every single step of the way and all things at Day 0, Day 1 and Day 2.
For us, Day 0 is about automation of provisioning and optional devices that are existing on your field primarily focused on the switching network.
Deployment on Day 1.
Talking about capitalization, how do you encompass configuration in large scale usage of colored and colorless ports.
On Day 2, we’ll focus on SLEs, Marvis Actions and alerting, which will help you troubleshoot your network overall better.
Now, automation in every step of this way, was the goal for the origin of MIST Wired Assurance.
Let’s talk about a few elements of Day 0.
From a perspective of onboarding devices, you now have existing brownfield devices that already exists on the network.
These are existing Junos devices 2300s, 3400s, 4300s, 4400s, 4100s now recently, as well as the distribution layer devices, 4650, QFX5120.
And also the core devices, which is QFX5120, the 9200s, as well as the 51700 and 5130s in QFX line.
All of these devices can all be adopted while it is brownfield adoption.
But since 2019, we’ve also been able to actually onboard devices by using just a QR code.
And that’s the Greenfield onboarding process.
In a world of cloud managed, which is, I’d like for our onboarding to be as console free as possible.
And that’s the idea behind utilizing the same constructs that we used in the AP world to make the switches onboarding extremely easy as well.
Preview of how you’d be able to make this possible using the mobile app.
In order for you to bring devices onboard, MIST delivers an AI app called as the MIST AI app.
And it’s available both on Apple as well as Android app stores.
Now, for you to be able to onboard a device, you’ll be able to install as an installer.
The installer role now has abilities for them to log in to a mobile app, go into the org of choice, go scan the QR code that is on your devices.
This is a QR code on a 4100.
The claim
It has been claimed successfully.
You can go into the actual switches, take a picture of the switch, attach it to the same device, assign it to a site of choice like we just did, and also provide a name for this particular switch.
This is the idea behind making the process of onboarding extremely seamless and simple for especially users who’re not very adept with our networking technologies.
When you’ve a large number of devices to onboard as well, you now have the ability not only just to do claim code, just the way you just saw it in the previous section, but also you can activate them using an activation code every time you place a purchase order regardless of the number of devices.
Be it APs, switches or WAN devices, all can be combined into one purchase order, and also can be claimed onto the dashboard altogether, be it thousand of switches or thousand of APs in one shot using one activation code.
And that’s a combination of all claim codes as to simply put it.
So you can onboard Greenfield devices either way, using a claim code on a per device basis, onboarding activation code just one shot, and then being able to onboard devices, every time.
Subsequently, when a juniper switch is connected to an uplink where it can reach the cloud, it will automatically start the process of zero touch provisioning, go to the cloud, make the initial contact and get the configured requires and is ready for servicing its clients.
If you have existing devices on Brownfield, you’re able to onboard them by using seven lines of code that is available on the dashboard, onboard them automatically, and then subsequently move further from there on as well.
So both ways are available for you to onboard switches on the dashboard.
The next part of the story is the actual configuration.
So there’s a whole lot of depth that we go into in terms of Day 0, Day 1 in the subsequent.
This is a primer on how this is done.
You will be able to configure global parameters like services, radius, standards, IP definitions, and VLAN definitions.
Similarly, anything that you think of from a routing perspective, as well as spanning tree perspective, all of these form the global piece.
The second pillar of our interface of a switch configuration forms the interface configuration themselves.
Interfaces.
For us, if you consider them as personas that come into your interface, then imagine there are multiple personas that are attached to your switch.
And each of them usually have the exact same configuration, be it from the perspective of bringing onboard devices.
So, for example, the number of APs that connect to multitudes of switches, all of the APs have a very similar configuration.
So you could create one persona or one port profile called as AP and you could apply them across multitudes of switches and across different sites as well.
And that’s the idea behind templatization the hierarchy and creation of port profiles in one shot.
You subsequently are able to provision them manually.
A lot of people have a lot of discipline or colored ports, as they call in, to say, you can assign port ranges port 1-10 as AP port, then between the camera ports and so on.
Or you could also use dynamic port provision.
And that is unique to a deployment from a standpoint of saying a device can automatically identify itself or using a set of rules.
And you don’t need to be in the business of provisioning a port every single device comes online.
Rather let the device identify itself.
And we can auto assign the port profile that you’ve already created.
For example, if an AP matches a particular LLDP rule, you can actually put them into the AP Profile.
MIST AP start with…
LLDP description starts with MIST.
So you match that and you put any device that matches that AP profile.
Similarly, you can do cameras.
And as a catch all, you could also use just a MAC addresses.
So some simple examples as to how dynamic port provision can also might make your life easier in order to provision at scale.
One of the most important things that we will cover as part of this video series is also campus fabric deployments.
The templatization and ability to scale from a perspective of onboarding distributed in prices, be it switch onboarding, client devices onboarding, make that simple using dynamic port profiles, zero touch provisioning.
Now, the larger the campus is, the more the advent of the technology of EVPN-VXLAN in order to make life simpler, in order to make the right architectural choice for us to say large campuses going forward, especially given the IoT presents requests for L2 to be stretched across multitudes of buildings.
Now, there is a need in large campuses for us to use VXLAN.
And with a control plane of VPN, we’re able to achieve scaling to the tune of larger and larger campuses.
With MIST, although the technology is new for a lot of campus customers, we’ve made the ability for us to configure these campus architectures simple.
We’ll talk about three important architectures and how you’re able to very easily provision them.
The first one is EVPN multi-homing.
This is our ability for us to use the technology of ESI lag or Ethernet segment identifier lag from an access to device perspective, connecting to different distribution devices or a collapse score as you may call it.
And from an access switch, you’ll still be a basic lag using LACP.
But from a distribution switch perspective, although it’s coming from a single device, you will treat them as the same lag or ESI lag as we call it, and then achieve similar results as you did with some of the technologies like MC lag, which was formerly used in the same case.
So a move ahead in the direction.
So try and limit the number of spanning tree instances just to the access switch itself and not go beyond.
So if there are any loops that may procedure in the network that will only be within this closet.
The construct of EVPN-VXLAN for a campus fabric also extends to core and distribution switches, which is the green blob that actually identifies where they are.
And that’s the middle architecture.
So you could use the middle architecture as well for us to bring devices on-board in terms of and also scale campus wide.
And your L2 switching still may not be refreshed in order for you to get to this architecture.
You get the advantages, most advantages of EVPM-VXLAN as a technology buying one important one, which is covered in the last architecture, which is the IP cloud architecture, which also brings in the construct of micro-segmentation, segmentation enforced all of it the axes, utilizing what the technology of GBP (or Group Based Policies).
All of these are discussed in great detail.
But the idea behind Wired Assurance though is we’re able to deploy these aspects as well as in campus fabric deployment.
So choose your topology, define the physical connections, define the networks of interest.
These are all things that you do today.
We’re not asking you to do anything from a perspective of enabling VNIs, which are a construct of VXLAN, but rather, we’ll still focus on elements that you care about.
And then we apply the intent for you.
So just before we get into Day 2, we spoke about automation being the heart of all things that we do and how we make your life simple.
We spoke about Day 0, onboarding using zero touch provisioning of devices.
We spoke about Day 1, templatization as well as the hierarchies, including how we’ll get be able to onboard devices, the client devices using dynamic port profiles.
Day 2 is the last piece of the puzzle.
However, we are able to not only address the Day 0 and Day 1, but also Day 2 is the focus of Wired Assurance course as well.
There’s a lot of asking about whether we need assurance on the wired network.
Is there an actual need’
There’s a host of problems that can persist on the wired network as well.
And these are just a subset that you see in the word cloud here: congestive interfaces, speed issues, negotiation mismatches, bad cables, physical layer one issues, CPU spikes, congestion on your network.
Many, many multitudes of issues.
And these run across thousands of ports that you run in your networks.
How are we able to pinpoint exactly what you care about and bring that about you is the answer in the form of what we call the SLE (or the Service Level Experience) framework.
Subsequently, Marvis actions as well as the conversational interface framework.
So these are the tools that’ll enable you and make your life easy in terms of troubleshooting, monitoring and alerting, identify all such issues, and also ask simple questions to the Marvis Conversational Interface (or Marvis CI) as we call it, wherein you can ask questions about ‘Hey, troubleshoot the switch, troubleshoot this particular client and how are we able to address and gather information for that.’
And that’s all things Wired Assurance.
You’ll hear more about Day 0 onboarding in detail, Day 1 configuration in detail, campus fabric configurations, as well as why you would move to campus fabric, if at all if there is a need for you and justification for so.
And ultimately, we’ll focus on the Day 2 aspects as well: the service level experiences, Marvis Actions, Conversational Interface.
This entire piece of bringing assurance to the wired side of the house is one piece of the puzzle that MIST addresses.
As you know, MIST has Wi-Fi assurance, wired assurance as well as WAN assurance.
Our end goal is to answer that important question: ‘Why is my application experience bad”
As you see, why is my Zoom call bad or breaking up is a question that we’d started on our journey to answer.
And wired assurance is a significant piece of it.
WAN assurance and Wi-Fi assurance in different courses, as part of this also addresses how we collect information on those vectors as well.
Eventually, Marvis is our AI engine that brings together all pieces of the puzzle together.
And that’s the journey we are headed in.
Wired Assurance is a critical piece towards this.
Hopefully, this was a good introduction as to what you could foresee in with what’s to come along this course.
And I’d like to thank you for starting this course journey with us.