Have you noticed that our template configuration is listed under classic in our UI for manager?
Well, the reason for this is because Cisco is trying to move away from templates.
We've been using them in this course because we still tend to use them,
especially if you've been doing SD-WAN for a while, and it's important for us to know how exactly these work.
They are still an active part of the exam and therefore they're in scope for this course.
However, Cisco is wanting us to migrate all of this and start to use configuration groups.
Configuration groups are simply a different way of doing the exact same thing. We're going to
modularly
deploy configuration to a bunch of different nodes.
So with templates, we recall that we've got a bunch of feature templates and
we've got
really a bunch of different types of feature templates. These are created on a per device
level. So for example, I have to create these for an 8000 V specifically and then I also have to map these
into a device template.
This isn't too bad, but in large deployments this can start to get a little bit messy.
We don't really like this in large
scaled out deployments.
It starts to get very difficult and cumbersome to deploy different feature templates to different device templates,
especially if we start creating many device templates. This starts to get really, really cumbersome.
So Cisco
said, all right, that was great. That was a great first start.
This is what Viptela created and Viptela, you know, had a good thing going, but we think we can do a little bit better.
And so Cisco
created the configuration groups and the reason they configured these is, again, for that sake of scaling.
They want us to be able to
really not worry about having many sites. So if we have
thousands of locations and thousands of edge devices, well, we still want to look at that and say, hey, don't worry.
We are good to go. We can handle that. No problem. And configuration groups are a much cleaner way to get that done.
So here's the way this works. I'm going to create a configuration group and
when I create this group,
I'm going to map it to some number of devices.
So these are specific devices, maybe for example,
Edge 101 and Edge 102, this kind of thing.
And so I'm going to map it to as many devices as
needed. I can add more devices in the future and I can remove devices and so on and so forth.
Then I'm going to create something that we call feature profiles.
These feature profiles,
believe it or not,
are containers for things that we refer to as
profile features.
Yes, this is
probably the worst possible name that Cisco could have come up with for these
because if you didn't notice, they're just inverses of one another. Feature profiles, profile features.
We could go around and around like that for a while. So how do I remember it?
Well, really what I want to do is focus in on the second word.
So this is the profile. It's the container for
features that go inside of the container. So as much as possible, focus in on that second word.
But what we're doing here is we're creating lots of different feature profiles with a bunch of different
profile features inside of those. So for example, when we looked at
OMP as a feature template, well, that's exactly what this kind of looks like.
Except it's much more modular than what feature templates were.
Cisco broke these down into smaller sections allowing us to reuse them even easier. So we're going to map
these feature profiles to the configuration group, which passes config ultimately to devices.
Which is the goal, is to get configuration to devices in a scalable way.
maybe I'm going to create a different OMP profile, but I can reuse
these other profiles. So I add these three profiles in and then map it to a bunch of devices this way.
So we sort of see how the architecture comes together. Just keeping in mind that again,
I'm going to have to pay attention to my wording here a little bit.
But in the end, the reason Cisco is doing this is again for the sake of scaling.
Scaling up to very large networks in a way that
makes it a whole lot less difficult and a whole lot less cumbersome again to get configuration onto actual devices.
So let's quickly see how this works.
I'm going to go over to configuration and notice again, our templates are listed under classics.
Cisco is still making them available and they haven't
deprecated them or even said that they're getting rid of them yet, at least at the time of this video. That might still come, but
Cisco recognizes a lot of organizations are built using templates.
Instead, Cisco suggests that we scroll all the way up here and we use configuration groups,
which are right at the very top of the list. If I didn't know any better,
I might just come to configuration and poke around using configuration groups, which is probably what Cisco wants.
And so here we see a list of tabs here and it scrolls over. I can look at all of my other profiles.
But again, these are all the profiles or feature profiles that are going to get mapped into a configuration group.
Now, this is a pretty slick interface. I can say let's go and create a configuration group. I'll just call this test group and
then a couple of things. First of all, I could make this a CLI configuration group, which applies CLI commands.
So that's kind of cool. And if I don't do that, then I can select whether this is a single router or dual router configuration.
Specifically, we're thinking about the fact that I might want to deploy these to a dual router site,
which should have most of the same configuration parameters.
And so that even smooths things out even more compared to feature templates,
So let's just call this a single router configuration group. And then what we're going to see, first of all,
is that I can start to apply profiles. Now, I'm going to have to apply a system profile.
So I can create a new system profile and I'll call this system test and hit create.
And it's going to allow me to create a system profile. Now, when we look at the system profile,
this is where we can get into the profile features. So again, system feature profile, profile features,
try to focus in on the second word. So we're looking at different features. So I can apply an OMP
set of features here. And this would look familiar because we just looked at this in the feature template side
and we see I've got the ability to enable and disable graceful restart. I can configure my ECMP limit.
And I can change my timers, the paths advertised per prefix, which is the send path limit and so on and so forth.
But once I click on one of these configuration groups, this is where I can add these profiles in.
I can click add profile here to add other profiles as well, depending on which of these profiles up here
I want to add in. So it's just a much more modular way of doing things. For our lab environment,
we've chosen to use the template approach. But moving forward, Cisco's probably going to want us to get familiar with configuration groups.
Again, both of them show up on the exam. So I just wanted to take a moment and
point out how we'd configure, for example, OMP configurations like we took a look at here. You come over to system profile.
Here's the system test that I created. I'd get into OMP and add an OMP
profile feature to a system feature profile.