Stackwise Virtual is a Cisco virtualization technology that allows for two Catalyst 9500 switches to virtually form a single switch, not unlike VSS with other Catalyst platforms.   This reduces the spanning tree domain and allows for Multi-chassis Etherchanneling (MEC). It will enable the StackWise Virtual pair to form aggregated links to connected switches and devices that supports LAG.

What is Cisco Smart Licensing

Lately, I have encountered some clients that are not familiar with or even confused with Cisco Smart Licensing. They are either are not from the Cisco world, have not had to work with Cisco licensing much or used to the traditional licensing model. Cisco is phasing out traditional licensing and this only add to the confusion. With traditional licensing, often a...

Introduction

Migrating another firewall to Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) can be a daunting task. Depending on the role of the firewall, it can have thousands of ACL entries, network and service objects and network address translations (NAT). Fortunately, for anyone that is migrating to Cisco FTDs that are managed by Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC), Cisco provides a firewall...

There may be certain situation when you need to reset a Cisco FTD appliance back to factory default to get a clean start. One such example is during a deployment I encountered a Cisco Bug for FTD version 7.0.4 locally managed by FDM. The bug caused a corruption in the database that cannot be repair and configurations from the FDM are not synced with the LINA, the ASA portion of the FTD. There...

Cisco Meraki recently introduced the MG series Cellular Gateways to be a reliable solution as a backup internet uplink. In the event that the primary internet uplink goes down, the MG gateway will provide high availability for internet connectivity via wireless WAN connectivity using a cellular network. The MG Series also simplifies configuration and management using Meraki’s dashboard.

Sometimes it is faster to just re-image the firepower module than to go through the step-by-step upgrade process where you must upgrade to the next release and then apply the all the updates. If the module is several releases behind than this process must be repeated several times. Luckily, in certain scenarios this can be avoided by just re-imaging to the latest Cisco recommended release. This...

With the FTDs being managed by FMC everything is now configured via GUI. There is no longer the option of configuring via CLI like the ASAs. You can still access the CLI but Cisco does not officially support configuration using the CLI. Obviously, there are pros and cons to this. You no long need to remember syntax and which command does what. You just need to know how to navigate the GUI menus...

Platform requirements

The migration tool requires the following to run:

If you have Meraki MX security appliances chances are that you have seen the SD-WAN & traffic shaping option in the Meraki dashboard menu. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) can dynamically optimize your WAN without having to make manual adjustments when network conditions change. In a network with redundant uplinks if one uplink becomes degraded, SD-WAN allows the network to dynamically select the...

Introduction

Recently, I have been working to upgrade Cisco network devices, mainly routers and switches, for a client. A recent network audit identified fragmentation in the IOSes and also security advisories. As a result, all the routers and switches required upgrades and it was a good opportunity for the client to standardize the IOSes for the different type of network devices in the...