today we're going to take a look at
the new 9120 access points that have
come out recently
i got my hands on a couple of them not
too too long ago and
wanted to run them in a little bit of a
lab environment and what i didn't
realize picking up two of them was that
you can get them
in two different modes one is going to
be the
lightweight mode that you'd use if you
had an existing controller and the other
would be the
embedded wireless controller where it
actually runs the 9800 controller
software on the access point itself
as a container you know and for my for
my lab environment
i looked at doing the virtual version of
the 9800 controller
but i wanted to save a little bit of vm
space so
i decided to look at trying to stand up
the
9800 controller embedded on the access
point itself and it turns out that the
conversion process is actually pretty
quick and straightforward
so the first thing that we're going to
do is go to cisco.com
we're going to go over to software
downloads
then we'll type in the access point in
my case it's the 9120
the axi look under the ios xe software
and grab the bundle for the 9120
embedded wireless controller ap
bundle image
all right in my case i've already gone
ahead and downloaded this ahead of the
video so i have an access point in one
of the 9120s sitting next to me right
now
and what we're going to go ahead and do
is plug this in
plug in a console cable and get this
thing booting up the boot up process is
going to take a couple of minutes so
we'll go ahead and skip ahead and come
back later
all right now the device is booted up
and we're at the username and password
prompt
we will go ahead and log in with cisco
and cisco as the username and password
both with a capital c
we'll go ahead and enter enable mode
also with password cisco
first thing we're going to do is set the
hostname using the command
cap wap ap hostname
and the name of the access point that
you choose in my case 0xap1
here are the software images i already
have loaded on the server
in this case i've unzipped the file that
we got from cisco.com and i have a tftp
server running in the background
now in this folder we see a bunch of
different images but we're going to need
only a couple of them
we can open up the readme file which
will show us the mapping of the ap
images to the file name in the directory
in our case since we have the 9120
access point we need the
ap1 g7 file we will also
need the 9800 ap ios xe
wlc dot bin file which loads the
controller software onto the access
point
let's check our software version first
in this case rap is running version 8.9
code today there's a little bit of a
difference
depending on which version will be
running we will use a different command
to load the image
so if we're on 8.9 or below we'll run ap
type mobility express
followed by the ap image and the wlc
image if we're running anything higher
than 8.9
we would use the command ap type ewc
ap and then the ap image followed by the
wlc image
in our case we are running 8.9 so we'll
go ahead and copy the string from the
top of here which i have already
pre-filled with the tftp
information
one thing i'd like to note is that after
the access point has rebooted we will no
longer see the command prompt for the
access point itself
instead we will see the command line for
the embedded wireless controller
one of the cool things about the
catalyst 9100 access points
is the ability to do something that we
call application hosting
what that means is that we can
essentially run a linux container or
docker container
on top of the access point there's
dedicated processing power
and storage to allow you to run some
small containers and services on top of
the access point itself this could be
great for one in this case
using the embedded controller on the
access point and not having to run it on
a separate appliance
or two you might be able to find another
application or use case
where you could deploy a small software
application to the access point to run
something closer to the user
one instance of that might be running
network monitoring like let's say
a monitoring agent or like smoke ping or
something like that to gather real time
latency and ping statistics
all right now that the access point has
completely booted up with the new image
the first thing we're going to see is
the same old always would you like to
enter the initial configuration dialog
in this case we will go ahead and say no
we'll manually configure the settings
that we need to
as i had mentioned earlier the access
point booted into
the new image but our command prompt
that we see now is not
the direct access point cli instead it
is the cli
for the wlc and we'll get a nice
friendly warning up front that asks us
to do the basic
day zero provisioning prior to deploying
the access point
so that's just gonna be a couple of
commands that we'll walk through quickly
here
first we will set the hostname of the
wlc
in my case i'm setting that to 0xc9800
next we'll configure an admin user
and provide it the privilege level as
well as a password to log into the web
interface
next we'll set an ap profile
so we'll say ap profile ap default
and we will configure a management user
for the access points
next we will configure the management ip
address for the 9800 series wireless
controller
this is going to be the ip address that
you use to
manage the device via ssh or the web ui
so we'll go into interface gigabit
ethernet 0 and add our ip address
configuration
now we can exit out of that and set a
default gateway
for the management interface of our
embedded wireless controller
we want to enable the web server
software on it by doing
the iphtp secure server
once we're done with all of that we can
go ahead and save the configuration and
we'll see pretty quickly that we'll get
the message stating that the day zero
provisioning is done
and there's a little bit of cleanup and
we'll be able to log
into our web interface shortly
let's go ahead and launch chrome and go
to the ip address of the wlc management
ip that we just configured
bypass our certificate warning
and now we have a login page we'll log
in using the credentials that we had
already configured
and now we'll be dropped into the 9800
wireless controller
dashboard which will give us a quick
overview of how many
lans we have configured how many access
points are up if we have any clients
funny enough we're already seeing that
there are 25
rogue aps detected in my area so let's
go ahead and click on the access point
and take a quick look
so we'll see that we have the ap that we
configured so this is the
underlying ap and hostname and stuff
that we configured prior to
uploading the wlc software and it's got
an ip via dhcp
we can click on the ap and get some base
statistics on whether the ap
is up if it's got enough poe what kind
of poe
and some radio statistics
in addition we also see a setting here
that says what the current primary
wireless controller is
in this case it's the access point that
we've configured already and that we are
running the controller on today
if we were to stand up a second access
point which i'll be doing shortly here
in my lab the two devices would
automatically communicate with each
other and pick what the active and
standby
controller is we're also able to
manually configure one of the access
points
as a preferred primary should we choose
in the event of any failure of the
primary
embedded controller the secondary
controller will come up
immediately using the same ip address
and configuration as the primary
controller
all right one additional thing that i
wanted to comment on before we finish
this up
as you can see i've switched to the
software management page that we can get
to by going over to administration
and then software management and you'll
see a couple of interesting things here
so one thing to note about the embedded
wireless controller
is that with a normal controller we
would expect that the controller is
going to
keep all of the software images loaded
in handy
for when a new access point comes online
and joins the controller is then going
to
send that software image to the new
access point as it joins the controller
to upgrade it and
get it to the software version that we
wanted on
in the case of the embedded wireless
controller since we don't have a lot of
space on the ap
itself we're going to need to configure
an external data source
to keep those software images so on this
page we're going to have a couple of
options
and as you can see under mode we're
going to see tftp
sftp cco and desktop
so tftp and sftp are going to be pretty
much what you might expect
we're going to define an external image
server with an ip address as well
as a path on the server if that's needed
for desktop we're going to load the
images directly from the pc that we're
connected to
so if i went and just downloaded the
images straight from cisco.com onto my
laptop
i could directly upload from there
lastly we have the option for cco
in which case you're going to specify
your cisco.com
username and password and you can
automatically download the
images straight from cisco's website
itself you even have the option to allow
the controller to automatically check
for software updates regularly
and you can define whether or not you
want it to download the latest software
version
or the latest recommended software
version
alright well that's all i had for today
thanks for watching