Cisco's Catalyst Center is at the forefront of network assurance and automation and is a key element of Cisco's SD-Access ecosystem. Interested to get some first insights into Catalyst Center? Here's our quick overview!
Cisco Catalyst Center allows network administrators to receive advanced insights into network performance. No more guesswork as to the root cause of slow downs, or issues - Catalyst provides analytics to troubleshoot as the network environment changes.
The concept of a network Health Score allows Catalyst to provide a useful answer to alarm blight.
When you get hit with thousands of alarms, it's almost impossible to determine a root cause. Catalyst does something different - it determines which issues actually impact the end user experience and reports on those.
So, what is Catalyst Center? It is typically first deployed to monitor your network. You move to automation mode, where you can start to deploy configurations and finally full SDA Fabric mode, where Catalyst Center is used to fully configure the network.
Cisco Catalyst Center is deployed either as a single node or as a three-node cluster for high availability. In a three-node cluster the nodes take a majority vote, so the cluster can keep operating if one node fails. For resilience across sites, Catalyst Center also supports a disaster recovery setup.
There are three main areas to consider in Catalyst Center:
Design: How the devices should look once they are configured
Provision: How Catalyst will configure these devices
Policy: What policy is applied in the configuration of devices
Cisco has announced the end of life of Prime Infrastructure, and Catalyst Center is its replacement. Catalyst Center works in a fundamentally different way from Prime, built around automation, assurance and intent-based networking rather than device-by-device management.
If you're still running Prime, the migration path is well established, and it's worth planning now rather than waiting for support to run out.
For the migration, the maps in Prime are exported to Catalyst Center and the Prime templates converted to Catalyst Center templates.
Catalyst migration will operate with the following three steps:
Convert Config to Intent: The configuration will be learnt from the devices being managed, and will be added to Catalyst Center in order to be able to automate future deployments
Import Maps and AP Location: Simplified import of Prime maps and AP locations to Catalyst Center
Migration: Migrate the services surrounding Prime to Catalyst - including CMX and Cisco ISE
Cisco ISE integrates quite tightly with Cisco Catalyst Center - so you can pull information from ISE to show why and how a client has failed to authenticate (no more fishing around through AAA logs - Catalyst Center does all the hard work and correlates this for you).
Once you've migrated you can start to get to grips with things like Catalyst Assurance (this is the 'monitoring' mode) and advanced topics, such as network machine learning and AI.
Cisco Catalyst Center is Cisco's management, automation and assurance platform for campus and branch networks. It discovers and provisions switches, wireless and routers, upgrades software, and shows network and client health in one place.
Yes. Cisco renamed DNA Center to Catalyst Center in 2023. The platform, features and upgrade path carried over, so older documentation that mentions DNA Center still applies.
Yes. Catalyst Center is Cisco's replacement for Prime Infrastructure, which has reached end of life. Inventory, templates and wireless maps can be migrated, though most teams use the move to tidy up their configuration.
Yes. As well as physical appliances, Catalyst Center is available as a virtual appliance, which suits smaller or lab environments. Sizing depends on the number of devices and clients you manage.
In this overview, we've looked at what Catalyst Center is, how it compares to Prime and how you can migrate.
The whole point of that migration though is to improve the way in which you manage, maintain - and deploy - your network.
IPTel deploys, migrates and supports Cisco Catalyst Center for Australian organisations, including Prime migrations. If that would be useful, get in touch with the IPTel team or email sales@iptel.com.au.