I have been working in the networking field for more than 13 years. Most of my deployments involve a lot of manual configurations. A lot of things had to be configured manually like VLANs, stacking, LACP, STP, some routing, and more. How does it look right now? What kind of changes have been made, and how do deployments differ compared to past years?
Currently, my Team and I are working on a campus LAN deployment. See the picture below. There are two core switches (quite powerful guys actually) and six less powerful distribution switches.
Only one of them will be configured completely by hand; the other seven switches will be configured almost without manual intervention. Apart from the core/distribution switches, there are also more than 150 access switches. The access layer deployment will be done automatically from start to finish, without any manual activities.
How is it possible that the network can be “self-forming”? What are the protocols behind the scenes? It looks like magic, but actually quite simple protocols are making this solution super beautiful.
Interested in how it works? Stay tuned; I will elaborate in detail in the next few blog posts.