Onboarding an IOS XE WAN edge

Meridian's new Bristol branch (site 14) arrived with an IOS XE router in place of a vEdge. IOS XE routers in controller mode, often called cEdges, are what most new deployments use. They join the same overlay and speak the same OMP, but the CLI differs: configuration goes through config-transaction, the tunnel is a real Tunnel interface, and service VPNs are VRFs. You bring the router in next to Manchester's vEdge.

CE1's chassis number is ce7cc814-68a6-5257-bd33-d73f6c144f5c and its token is 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef. On a real order these come from your device list.

What this course leaves out. There is no SD-WAN Manager (vManage) in any of these labs. A virtual edge can't join the Manager's inventory without a signed device list from Cisco, which these labs don't have. So you won't see the Manager's GUI, dashboards, templates, Policy Builder or zero-touch onboarding. You work at the CLI of the controllers and edges, with a private lab CA and device lists typed by hand. This is one IOS XE edge on 16.12, brought up by hand. There are no device templates or configuration groups, and the features that often decide the choice of IOS XE, such as the enterprise firewall, per-tunnel QoS and AppQoE, aren't in this course.