Cisco SD-WAN CML Lab Installation

Lessons Discussion
21

Hi,

if I need to take hypervisor-level snapshots of your entire CML server VM, what I get with backing up with CML SD-WAN automation tool?

I have bare metal installation.

Not sure I have understood you completely, my concern is if I can, and how to perform backup and then to restore the entire SDWAN lab. If I perform backup with the tool, how to restore this configuration to one particular YAML file where I have stored topology and configuration of non-SD-WAN nodes? Where should I refer to the YAML file?

22

Hi @A1A1 ,

Let me jump in on this. With regular CML labs, it’s simple. A single YAML contains the topology + device configs. That’s all you need to restore a lab. For example:

This isn’t enough for Cisco SD-WAN labs because many lab-specific items are not in the running config but on the device storage. That’s why you have the backup tool:

When you restore:

It basically does a new deployment and then copies everything using Sastre.

It also should take care of non-SD-WAN devices:

For non-SD-WAN nodes, export the configuration if it’s supported by CML.

So with the backup and restore tool, you should be able to back up the whole topology, all configurations, stuff like certificates/templates that could be on storage, and non-SD-WAN device configs too.

There shouldn’t be any need to download the lab/topology yourself from CML for these kind of labs. The backup/restore tool should do it all.

Even if you would run CML on a Hypervisor, I wouldn’t do an entire VM snapshot. It takes up a lot of storage, is slow, and CML is easy to redeploy when needed.

Rene

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23

Hi Rene,

great, thank you for the explanation. It is really helpful knowing that I don’t need to perform separate backups - for SDWAN, and non-SDWAN nodes.

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