All right, let's go ahead and quickly take a look at how we get access to CML.
So we are here at the Cisco Learning Network Store.
We can find this via any kind of internet search to search for Cisco Learning
Network
Store.
And then what we want to do is find CML Personal.
This version of the website is listed right here.
We could also search for it up here.
But either way, I'm just going to click on CML Personal.
It's going to take me right here.
So I see the two options, Cisco Modeling Labs Personal.
And Cisco Modeling Labs Personal Plus.
We see the price at the time of this video over here in US dollars.
And you're going to want to decide which version of that to procure.
Again, I would just recommend Cisco Modeling Labs Personal, at least for the
sake of this
specific course.
So once we've gone through the process of adding it to the cart and purchasing
it,
we can access it by going to our account up here.
So now I am listing here my account.
I see that I have purchased Personal Plus, actually somewhat recently.
And I can click on View Licenses.
And this is going to give me my registration token.
So I'm going to need this token.
I can copy it right here.
Probably don't want to do it quite yet.
I know I just did it and that's fine.
You can copy it and then paste it in later.
But we need to get CML up and running first in order to, first of all, be able
to paste
in the license key.
So from here, I can click Download.
This is going to open up a whole other section of Cisco's website.
It's going to take me to software.cisco.com and it's going to allow me to
download CML Personal
Edition.
Now notice that at the time of this video, CML Personal 2.8.1, this is the
version that
is the most recent and therefore this is what we're building this course on.
So a couple of things.
First of all, by the time you're watching this and procuring CML, there's
probably going
to be a newer version of this unless you happen to watch this very quickly
after we
go live.
So we can always try the most recent version because generally speaking, our
labs will
be backward compatible or maybe I should say the new version will be backward
compatible
with older labs.
So you should be able to download the latest version and still test out and
download one
of our labs and upcoming skills and make sure that everything works well.
If that's a problem, then also notice that over on the left, Cisco has a bunch
of older
releases.
So we should be able to still download 2.8.1 and just for the sake of this
course, can
run CML 2.8.1 and then once they're done with the course, it could maybe
upgrade to
the latest version and make sure that we've got all of the more most modern
features.
But at a minimum, just keep in mind that 2.8.1 is the version that we're
running for this
course and that would be probably the right version to deploy if our primary
use case
for CML is going to be going through this content.
Now as we scroll down here, we do see a bunch of different options.
So what's going on here?
Well, like we mentioned, we've got a VMware option that would be the dot OVA
right here.
So OVA's are going to be a template file that essentially allows us to deploy a
virtual
machine very, you know, it's preconfigured.
This goes preconfigured virtual machine for us.
And so that's what the OVA is all about.
We also have the zip file up here.
So notice it says this image is for bare metal deployment.
And if we're going to use VMware, we should use the OVA.
I love all these pop-ups.
It's very difficult to point things out, but we see this it's an ISO.
We're just going to mount it via CD DVD drive and it's, you know, it's a dot
zip file.
So once we download the dot zip, extract it, pull out the ISO and then use that
mount it
virtually to our server.
And again, that's what it allows us to do a bare metal deployment.
We also have a couple options for upgrades.
So we see that we've got this as an option to upgrade an existing version.
If we do have an existing version, just at that point, scroll up here, there's
this release
notes option.
Click this.
We see over on the left that we've got the ability to migrate to CML 2.8.
So it's going to require us running a specific version.
And again, this is at the time of this video, 2.8 is the most recent version.
You will find if you're running 2.9 or 3.0 or whatever is in the future that
there will
be migration instructions here, again, usually via the release notes.
So follow those closely if you're upgrading an older version to a newer release
.
Now lastly, and this is important as well.
After we're downloading the ISO for bare metal or the OVA for VMware, we're
going to need
what's known as a ref-plat, the reference platform ISO.
So I can download this right here.
Again, it's a zip.
I need to extract it and get the ISO out there.
But we see this funny name here.
It's called a ref-plat for reference platform.
This contains the image files that are used for the environment.
So I want to make sure I have all of the image files that CML provides,
including SD-WAN.
Now there's a couple of these here.
One is down here.
If we're not migrating from existing installation, this is the one that we'd
want to download.
The ref-plat that, well, regardless, FCS-ISO down here in this version, the
supplemental
is only for adding to an existing installation.
We just want to add SD-WAN, which, hey, we probably do, as well as any
firepower nodes.
Image definition is basically saying, I've already got CML.
Now I want to add specific images to an existing environment.
So long story short, if we are deploying this from scratch, meaning we don't
have an existing
environment, then we are going to either download the bare metal, or, more
likely, for most
of us, we're going to download the OVA from VMware.
And then we will download this bottom ref-plat, the one that is basically for
people who aren't
migrating.
If you are migrating, you're going to want to use some of the upgrade options
that are
listed here.
What we're going to want to do is start to download things.
So start to download the OVA and start to download this ref-plat as we see they
're very
sizable, especially the ref-plat, which is 10 gig in size, but even the OVA is
over a
gig.
So let's go ahead and get those downloading, and then we can get them deploying
as the
next step.
So let's go ahead and log into VMware.
And for me, I just have a single ESXi host in my lab environment.
You might be logging into vCenter.
Either way, we just want to log in and we want to be able to create a virtual
machine.
So whether it's local or via vCenter, either way, I'm going to create a virtual
machine.
We have this option to deploy it from an OVA for an OVA file.
That's what we have is we have an OVA.
I'm going to click Next, and now I can enter a name.
We'll call it something like cml lab, something along those lines.
And then I can drag the OVA onto this.
Now pay attention to this.
It depended on where your host lives.
Like for example, for me, my host lives across a VPN.
I'm about to drag a one gig file onto there.
That means that it's going to have to upload this to the host.
So there are ways to make it so you could upload it to a data store and then
install
it from there.
But VMware prefers to do it this way.
And that's perfectly fine.
So just to understand what we're signing up for, which might be making sure
that our connection
stays alive for a half an hour or an hour while this thing transfers depending
on your
network connection.
If you have a fast network connection, this will be relatively instantaneous.
So I'm going to go ahead and drag the OVA over.
It should look something like this.
CML2, whatever version we're deploying, and then.ovA.
So next I'm going to just select which data store we want to use to install it.
This part is important.
Our network needs to connect into our management domain.
I need to be able to reach this device or this CML.
I need to be able to type the IP address into my web browser and log into it.
So make sure that we're on the proper network.
This should be a reachable one in my environment.
This lab network is not reachable.
If I were, for example, to want to spin up a bunch of routers, then that's what
this
lab network is, and I wouldn't have access to that myself.
So I'm going to make sure I'm attaching to the management network.
And then this can be thin provisioned in power on automatically.
Actually, I'm going to disable this.
We could just power it off right away, and that's fine.
But again, we need to edit the OVA because we are the virtual machine itself
once it's
spun up because I want to make sure I have all of those resources that we
talked about.
The VCP use and the memory.
So let's go ahead and click next here and then finish.
And down here at the bottom, we're going to see that it's going to upload this.
So we see this here.
We are uploading first, and then we have to, it'll get installed at that point.
So the downside is, as I said, this is going to take a while.
We're at 1%, 2% now, 3%.
We can see because of my VPN, transferring 1 gig is going to take a while.
Hopefully your environment goes a whole lot faster.
The good news is I go over to virtual machines.
CML lab is listed here.
So because I didn't say to power it on, we can edit this machine, and we can
change
it.
So again, Cisco is making no assumptions about our environment.
They're saying, hey, this could be a really small infrastructure.
So we only have four VCP use.
This is where I recommend selecting 16.
And memory is very low at 8.
I would recommend 64 or possibly 96 again if we've got the additional space and
we want
to be able to play around with more devices all at once.
The other thing to consider here is at some point during the install process,
we're going
to need to connect the CD DVD drive.
And we're going to need to mount that ref-plate ISO.
Now, I've already uploaded this to the data store, which is something else that
you can
do in the meantime while the virtual machine is getting installed.
And we should see that we have these ref-plats.
Now I've done upgrades a few times throughout my time running CML.
The most recent one here is this 2024 1061.
So I would select this and again connect it.
Now this could disconnect during installation and spin up.
So there might come a point in the CML installation process where we need to
say, hey, I'm going
to come back in here and click this connect button.
So just be aware that that might disconnect pretty quickly after we have
connected it.
So for right now, yeah, see even right now it's saying not connected.
So I can connect that later.
Just be aware of how that works.
Oh, and you know what?
I did jump the gun here because I started editing it while it's being deployed.
So all of that just reset, which is perfectly fine.
We just have to make sure that we do it once it's being deployed.
So we're at 23%.
So let's go ahead and hit the pause button here, wait for it to finish, and
then we'll
see what it looks like to spin up CML from the interface.
All right.
So this installation was successful and I went ahead and re-edited all of those
resources
since it wasn't able to take that while it was still deploying it.
But now we are up and running and we see that this is working.
I'm going to go ahead and click on this CML lab screenshot here.
This will allow me to configure it via console.
And that's going to be very important.
I'll show it up over here.
Let's go and drag it on over.
And so it's going to walk us through the installation process and ask us some
important
questions as we go through this.
So once again, up until now we've just demonstrated deploying CML into a VMware
environment.
You might have decided to deploy it into bare metal, but regardless, once we
get to this
point, this should be a shared experience between VMware and bare metal
deployments.
It's just going to require us to get the basic configuration set so we can then
log in via
the web browser.
So here we go.
We have now been taken to the CML installation.
We can, well, if I can get the keyboard to work, there we go.
And so we're going to accept the EULA and say continue and continues just
letting us know
how we can navigate this.
Two interfaces are required for clustering.
We're not going to cluster.
Clustering is only primarily used for enterprise deployments that would allow
us to have a
robust, very high scale environment.
Again, not for CML personal.
So we can call this whatever we want.
We'd actually call it the CML-Lab.
I'll just call that CML-Lab there.
It continue.
So now is where we want to attach the ref-plat.
So this reference platform concept.
It's noticing that it's not connected even though we had tried to connect it
earlier.
So I'm going to come to edit now and we'll see that the data store ISO file isn
't connected.
So I'm going to say connect.
There's a scroll down here.
We should see that that ref-plat is still remembered that that's the one we
wanted.
So it should show connected.
Now I'm going to come back here.
We're going to say retry.
And now it did find it.
So that is what we're going to want to do to make sure that we've got that ref-
plat ISO
associated or connected ultimately.
Now, the other thing to consider is that there's going to be two sides to the C
ML management.
There's going to be CML itself.
And then there's the management side, which is known as cockpit.
We're going to log in with CML.
We'll see with admin to log into cockpit, which is required for system
maintenance and
upgrades and such.
It's going to require a different login.
And as we see the default is this admin.
So we can change it.
I would recommend just leaving it because if it's a lab environment, so I'm
going to
enter my lab password here.
Oops, continue to confirm.
There we go.
Login password for my lab environment.
It's not strong, but it's again, it's a lab that's fine.
This is CML.
This is what I'm going to log in with to perform my actual labbing.
So we see that it's a username of admin.
So once again, can change it if we want to.
So now we've got DHCP versus static.
I'm just going to leave this as DHCP.
We could configure static IP address if we so desire.
And then we're just going to confirm everything is good and start to fire this
up.
So now it's going to copy the images off of our ref-plat ISO and go ahead and
enter
and get CML up and running here.
So I'm going to pause the video again.
And once we're good to go, then we'll be able to log into our CML environment.
All right, now it is done loading.
We are ready to log in.
So I've already done that here.
I'm logged into the interface and we are greeted with saying, hey, we can get
more out
of CML.
Let's just do and dismiss that.
The first thing we're going to need to recognize is that we are in an un
licensed state right
now.
So I'm going to click down here.
Notice that my licensing isn't quite ready or isn't entered.
And so we're running in free mode, which allows me to run five devices.
So the first thing we should do is go to tools and go to licensing.
And then we can choose the product configuration.
So depending on whether you chose personal or personal plus, we're going to
want to select
this.
So assuming we've picked personal, we're going to select it there, click save.
And now I can put my license in so I can click the register button.
And this is where I would paste that token in that we saw at the store.
So we come back to which tab was it?
Here we go.
So this registration token, we will just click copy, copy the whole thing, and
then paste
it into our license here.
So I've already got a CML instance fired up in licensed.
I'm not going to add a license here.
But then what we can do is go to the dashboard, and this is where we'll start
to look around
our CML and actually deploy it to PolyG.
So up until now, at this point where we should be, we should have access to CML
, we should
be able to, we should have our license installed.
Hopefully we've had good success procuring it, downloading it, deploying it
into our environment.
And now we are actually ready to do the fun part, which is deploy labs into our
CML space.