Understanding the Device Discovery Process
When a new device with network configurations is added to the network, Network Director runs a job to discover the device. Two minutes after device discovery, Network Director initiates another job called the brownfield process. The brownfield process ensures that the new device is ready to be used in the network by deploying the required configurations to the device.
To support rapid network deployment, Junos Space Network Director enables you to define your network configuration in a set of profiles that you can apply to multiple objects in your network. For example, you can define a Port profile to set up class-of-service (CoS), authentication, firewall filters, and Ethernet switching settings that are appropriate for all access ports in your network that connect to employee desktop VoIP phones.
You can manually create Profiles from the Network Director user interface or the profiles may be created automatically by Network Director when you discover a device. Once a device, that has network configurations, is discovered, Network Director initiates a Brownfield process to read the configuration and create the necessary profiles for all the supported configuration from the discovered device.
Figure 1 displays how the brownfield process works in Network Director.
Using the brownfield process, Network Director completes the following actions:
Fetching the complete configuration file of the newly discovered device and looking for matching profiles in the Network Director database.
Using basic configurations from the already existing matching profiles in the database (such as VLAN IDs, ports, authentication protocols, class of service, firewalls, and so on) to deploy on the newly discovered device. If a matching profile does not exist, Network Director uses the configuration in the newly discovered device to create a new profile that can then be associated with other devices added to the network in the future.
Benefits of the Device Discovery Process
A newly discovered device becomes functional in a matter of minutes after it is brought into the network because Network Director automatically assigns an existing profile to the device or creates a new profile without manual intervention.
Device configurations are reused so you do not need to configure basic features (for example, the VLAN ID) for every newly discovered device added to the network.
Bulk provisioning of profiles on devices means you can change any parameter (for example, VLAN) on the profile to effect the changes on multiple devices simultaneously.