Cisco Network Plug and Play Overview
The Cisco Network Plug and Play solution provides a simple, secure, unified, and integrated offering for enterprise network customers to ease new branch or campus rollouts, or for provisioning updates to an existing network. The solution provides a unified approach to provision enterprise networks comprised of Cisco routers, switches, and wireless devices with a near zero touch deployment experience. For more information on the Cisco Network Plug and Play solution, see Solution Guide for Cisco Network Plug and Play.
The Cisco Network Plug and Play application allows you to pre-provision the remote project or claim unplanned devices. When you provision a large project, you can use the Cisco Network Plug and Play application to pre-provision the project and add devices to the project. This includes entering device information and setting up a bootstrap configuration, full configuration, and Cisco device image for each device to be installed. The bootstrap configuration enables the Plug and Play Agent, specifies the device interface to be used, and configures a static IP address for it.
When you create small projects where pre-provisioning is not required, devices can be deployed without prior set up on the Cisco Network Plug and Play application and then claimed. When the device installer installs and powers up the Cisco network device, the device auto-discovers the Cisco APIC-EM controller by using the DHCP or DNS. After the auto-discovery process is complete, the device is listed as an unplanned device in the Cisco Network Plug and Play application. You can use the Cisco Network Plug and Play application to claim the unplanned device and configure it with a new configuration and Cisco device image.