Understanding Build Mode in Views Other than Service View of Connectivity Services Director
In Build mode, you build the network managed by Junos Space Connectivity Services Director. It provides you with the ability to use device discovery to bring devices under Connectivity Services Director management, to customize your view of the devices, to configure devices, and to perform some common device management tasks.
This topic describes:
Discovering Devices
Device discovery finds your network devices and brings them under Connectivity Services Director management. You provide Connectivity Services Director with identifying information about the devices you want Connectivity Services Director to manage—an IP address or hostname, an IP address range, an IP subnetwork, or a CSV file that contains this information. Connectivity Services Director uses the information to probe the devices by using either ping or SNMP get requests. If a device probe is successful, Connectivity Services Director then attempts to make an SSH connection to the device using the login credentials you supply. If the connection is successful and the device is a supported device, Connectivity Services Director adds the device to its database of managed devices. Connectivity Services Director uses Juniper Network’s Device Management Interface (DMI), which is an extension to the NETCONF network configuration protocol, to connect to and configure its managed devices.
You can also discover devices using the device discovery feature provided by the Junos Space Network Management Platform. Devices you discover using Junos Space device discovery are brought under Connectivity Services Director management if they are supported by Connectivity Services Director.
Besides bringing your devices under Connectivity Services Director management, device discovery:
Reads the device configuration and saves it in the Junos Space configuration database. Connectivity Services Director uses this record of the device configuration to determine what configuration commands it needs to send to a device when you deploy the configuration on the device. For this reason, it is important for the Junos Space configuration record to match, or be in sync with, the device configuration. For more information about how the Junos Space configuration record and device configuration are kept in sync, see Understanding Resynchronization of Device Configuration.
Imports the device configuration into the Build mode configuration. For more information about importing device configurations, see Importing Device Configurations.
Building the Custom View
When a device is discovered in the physical network mode, it is added to the network tree in the View pane.
The Custom Group View displays only the top level—My Network—until you create one or more custom groups. Custom group is another way of grouping your devices based on your business needs. You can create custom groups and add devices to each custom group. You can manually add devices to a custom group or you can define rules to add devices, that match the rule condition, to the custom group once they are discovered by Connectivity Services Director. You can view the custom groups and devices that are assigned to each group in the Custom Group view.
This section does not apply to virtual devices that Connectivity Services Director manages.
Configuring Devices
In Build mode, you can define the configuration of network devices in your Physical network. To support rapid, large-scale deployment of devices, you can define much of your Build mode configuration in a set of profiles. You can reference profiles in other profiles or apply them to multiple objects in your network—devices, ports, radios, logical entities. For example, you can create a class-of-service (CoS) profile that contains settings that are appropriate for E-Line, IP, and E-LAN services that you can manage, provision, and monitor in Service View of Connectivity Services Director.
In addition to creating configuration profiles, in Build mode you can configure Link Aggregation Groups (LAGs) on routers.
Deploying Device Configurations
After you build your device configurations in Build mode, you need to deploy the configurations on the devices. None of the configurations you create in Build mode affect your devices until the configurations are actually deployed on the devices.
To deploy the configuration on devices, use Deploy mode. When you change a device’s configuration in Build mode, the device becomes available in Deploy mode for configuration deployment.
Importing Device Configurations
As part of device discovery, Connectivity Services Director analyzes the configuration of a newly discovered device and automatically imports the configuration into the Build mode configuration for that device.
As it imports the device configuration, Connectivity Services Director automatically creates profiles to match the configuration. It first determines whether any existing profiles match the configuration, and if so, assigns those profiles to the device. It then creates and assigns new profiles as needed. For example, if an access switch has some ports that match the configuration of an existing Port profile, Connectivity Services Director assigns the existing Port profile to those ports. For the other ports, Connectivity Services Director creates as many Port profiles as needed to match the port configurations and assigns them to the ports.
You can manage the profiles that Connectivity Services Director creates as part of device discovery in the same way that you manage user-created profiles—that is, you can modify, delete, or assign them to other devices.
Out-of-Band Configuration Changes
Out-of-band configuration changes are configuration changes made to a device outside of Connectivity Services Director. Examples include changes made by:
Using the device CLI.
Using the device Web-based management interface (the J-Web interface or Web View).
Using the Junos Space Network Management Platform configuration editor.
Using RingMaster software.
Restoring or replacing device configuration files.
When an out-of-band change is made, the device configuration no longer matches the Build mode configuration, and the device configuration state changes to out of sync. You cannot deploy configuration on a device that is out of sync. Use the Resynchronize Device Configuration task in Deploy mode to resynchronize the device configuration. For more information about how Connectivity Services Director resolves out-of-band configuration changes and synchronizes the Build mode configuration with the device configuration, see Understanding Resynchronization of Device Configuration.
Before you make configuration changes in Build mode, make sure that devices that will be affected are in sync. Resynchronizing the device configuration can result in losing pending Build mode configuration changes for that device.
Managing Devices
In addition to the tasks that allow you to build your network, Build mode provides a number of tasks for day-to-day device management. For example, you can:
View a device’s hardware component inventory or its installed licenses
Reboot a device or groups of devices
Connect to a device’s CLI through SSH or to its web-based management interface
View the profiles assigned to a device