Converged Access Workflow Lifecycle
The converged access lifecycle includes five phases starting from design to deployment phases. In each phase, network administrator should follow the procedure to successfully deploy converged access using the workflow. Following Figure illustrates the five workflow phases where each phase may require work tasks beyond using the Cisco Prime Infrastructure.
The converged access workflow lifecycle starts with design phase, and goes through additional phases as shown in Figure above.
- Design – It is the first phase in the workflow lifecycle, and involves selecting the Converged Access deployment model and determining the guest network service requirements –
- Plan – The network administrators must plan how they would like to deploy the WLANs and their associated services across their network, such as WLAN, VLAN and wireless policy setings.
- Prepare – This is the readiness stage of the converged access deployment plan. In this phase, the network administrator must ensure that the network foundation has the required layer 2/3 configuration applied prior to integrating converged access, for example, client VLAN. This step also requires certain wireless specific pre- requisites which are not supported in the workflow today. The network administrator ensures that the network complies with the following key requirements.
- Automate – This phase automates the configuration of wireless on single or multiple sites based on planning, after the required elements in prepare stage are in place and operational. If the common configuration parameters are exported and saved, future similar deployment automation can be further optimized by importing these configuration values instead of manually entering them again.
- Validate – This phase validates the deployment. Validation is performed on the Cisco Prime Infrastructure as well as on the converged access devices, and covers verification of APs, clients, and applications.