We have one issue that we're going to have to address
when it comes to the idea of a centralized policy.
And that is that, believe it or not,
even at this point, up until now,
we've been running vSmart in unmanaged mode,
which means that we have logged in a couple of times,
done some things via the CLI,
and yeah, we're allowed to do that
because we're not actually running it in managed mode.
If we want to see evidence of that,
we can simply come over here to our configuration
and look at our control components.
And under control components,
we see our controller is sitting here
in the unmanaged state.
Now I can come over to actions here and I can say,
hey, let's run in manager mode.
And we're going to get this nice little pop-up that says,
hey, if we're going to run in manager mode,
then we should probably attach a template.
Otherwise it's not going to have any configuration.
All right, well, that makes sense.
So I can either click this button here to go to the template
or I can go to my configuration
and then down here to classic and templates,
which is where it lands us.
And this is where we created device templates
for building out our edges.
Now here's a little bit of a difference
with how we're going to approach this.
In order to build the device template for our edges,
we use the concept up here of feature templates.
The idea here was that I want to use the manager UI
in order to apply configuration.
So when we clicked over here,
we saw that we created templates for our VPNs,
for our interfaces, for our routing,
lots of different features
that normally I would deploy via CLI.
In fact, when we took a look at this earlier in the course,
we did it both via the feature templates
and device templates that would be our managed edges,
edges 11 and 12 in our lab.
And then we also did the same thing,
but using CLI commands and we applied those
to edges 13 and 14, which are in unmanaged mode.
So the concept of feature templates,
this sort of feels a little modular plug and play style
where I can create a bunch of feature templates
and then I can apply them into a device template.
And when I match that device template
to a device like an edge,
then it will push all of that configuration down.
So that is perfectly fine.
We can absolutely approach things this way.
The difference here and what we want to think about
is the fact that our vSmart or our SD-WAN controller
already has a configuration.
So I really don't want to have to rebuild
that configuration from scratch,
meaning create a bunch of feature templates
and then create a device template and push it down
and completely override
what configuration we've had in place.
So in order to avoid that situation,
what we can do is we can place the vSmart or the controller
into managed mode, thanks to the concept of a CLI template.
So when I create a device template here,
normally in the past, we've done this from a feature template
I can just say, let's create it via CLI template.
Now this is not something I have to go and create.
There's no CLI template option over here.
I simply create this and now I'm taken to a prompt
and we'll see how this comes together in a moment.
So first of all, we're going to choose the device model
just like we always would.
You might say, well, what device model am I choosing
if I want to apply this to my vSmart
or my SD-WAN controller?
Well, we keep calling it vSmart and SD-WAN controller
for a reason because sometimes it will refer to it
as a vSmart and in this case right down here,
we see that Cisco has removed vSmart from the list.
Other times it's going to refer to things like manager here,
SD-WAN manager, or if I scroll up a little ways,
we will see, whoops, I passed it.
It's right there.
It's the controller.
So this is the device model that I want to select.
In previous versions of SD-WAN manager or vManage,
you may have used this or seen this
and see that it does list vSmart in the list.
If you're using an older version,
it might still say vSmart in the list.
So this is why we try to use both terms as much as we can
just to make sure that we understand
that sometimes it's referred to as a vSmart
and sometimes it's referred to as an SD-WAN controller.
So from here, I can give this a template name.
So I'm just going to call this something like controller CLI
and then for the description,
we'll just say that it's a CLI template for our controller.
So now here's where the magic works
because, okay, once again,
I'm trying to avoid having to redo a whole lot of work.
I already have a controller with a configuration,
but check this out right here,
load running config from a reachable device.
So I can use this dropdown
and because it knows I'm looking for controllers,
it allows me to select my controller
and within a second or two,
it has the configuration already pasted in here.
Now I could have gone out to the CLI
and copied and pasted it in myself,
but why go to all that trouble?
Work smarter, not harder, as they say.
And so the device, the vManage or manager
has done that for us.
One other thing to be aware of with CLI templates
is this concept of creating a variable.
So if, for example,
I wanted to apply this to multiple controllers,
I probably wouldn't want to paste the system IP
to all of them all at once, right?
I don't want to give them all the same system IP.
So I'm going to highlight the IP address
and come up here to create variable
and I'll give it a variable name like sysIP,
something like that, and then say create variable.
And notice what it did.
It replaced the actual IP address
with a pair of curly brackets
surrounding the variable name that I gave it.
So now I can click add
and I'm going to apply it to the device
that I want to apply it to.
So here's my controller type of template.
I'm going to use the three ellipses over here
and say attach devices.
I'm going to attach it to my controller.
It should ask me for that variable.
Let's go ahead and, oh, right here.
So I have to double click and type in the system IP address.
In my case, I want it to be 3.3.3.3.
But again, if we had three controllers
we were applying it to, we could actually apply it here
while using one template and then add in the system IP
at this stage as that variable.
So here I'm going to click next and configure devices
and we're going to push this down now
to our SD-WAN controller.
So give it a few moments here to progress
and we'll talk about it on the other side
once it is completed.
Okay, again, that didn't take too long
but no reason to sit around and wait.
So we've got a success here, that's great.
Let's go and go back to configuration,
look at our control components.
And that was the wrong one.
We want devices control components
not under certificates here.
And now we see that the controller is being managed
specifically by this template.
So it's no longer in an unmanaged state
and now we can move forward
with applying a centralized policy
now that vSmart is actually being managed
by our SD-WAN manager.