Prepare for Device Onboarding (Day -2 and Day -1 Activities)

Before a device is onboarded to Routing Director, a network architect and network planner must add the following to Routing Director.

1. Network resource pools to automatically assign IPv4 addresses, loopback addresses, and BGP cluster IDs. See Add Network Resource Pools.

2. A network implementation plan for onboarding the device. In the network implementation plan:

   1. Add devices and device interfaces.

   2. Assign device profiles, interface profiles, and port profiles to the devices and interfaces in the plan.

      A device profile is created based on the role of a device in the network to define the device-level configurations. For example, a device might be a provider edge (PE) device or a metro router. For the PE device, you can configure BGP, IS-IS, and add tunnels in your device profile, whereas for the metro router, you can configure only BGP and IS-IS protocols.

      An Interface profile is created based on the role of the interface and defines the routing protocol configurations (OSPF, IS-IS, RSVP, and LDP) on the interface. See Add an Interface Profile.

      A port profile defines the aggregate Ethernet interfaces (MTU and Tagging) on the device. See Add a Port Profile.

   3. Define the connections between devices added to the plan.

Apart from using the network implementation plan for applying configurations on a device during onboarding, you can use the network implementation plan to make any changes to the device or interface configurations even after the device is onboarded. For example, after a device is onboarded, at a later time, to upgrade the software on the device, you change only the software version of the device in the network implementation plan and publish the plan. Routing Director automatically upgrades the software of the devices added to the plan.

If you assign a device to a network implementation plan, Routing Director starts monitoring the device, which enables it to track the device's performance and health right after the device is onboarded.

After you create the network implementation plan for a device, the device can be installed and onboarded to Routing Director. See Install and Onboard a Device (Day 0 Activities).