Practical ISE Automation with Ansible

Cisco ISE Technical Marketing Engineer (TME) Thomas Howard gives you lots of inspiration for some of the great things you can do with ISE, Meraki, and AWS using Ansible to automate your network!

00:00 Intro & Agenda
01:43 Why Automation for ISE and the network?
03:34 Automation Expectations vs Reality
04:11 Demo Overview: ISE with Meraki in AWS using Ansible
07:47 Demo: Create a Python Environment
09:15 Demo: Load Environment Variables for securely using passwords, tokens, etc. in our demo
11:22 Demo: Launch VSCodium IDE
12:17 Demo: Run the Ansible playbook for AWS VPC, ISE instance, Meraki vMX, Linux VM, SSIDs
19:36 Orchestration (Terraform) and Configuration (Ansible) Tools
21:02 Idempotence
22:03 ISE Deployment and Operational Lifecycle: Provision, Deploy, Configure, Operate, Delete
24:24 Data Serialization for Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
25:39 GUI vs XML vs JSON vs YAML
27:14 YAML Network Device definition in ISE
30:54 Running Ansible Playbooks
36:58 Ansible Project Folders: configuration, inventory, roles, variables, playbooks
41:33 Back to the Demo!
42:15 Demo: Ansible Inventory files: static localhost and dynamic AWS
46:36 Demo: Ansible Variables for Playbook
49:13 Demo: Ansible for ISE CLI `show version` and `show application status ise`
51:44 Demo: Thomas forgot to uncomment `domain_name`! Idempotency FTW!
54:33 Demo: ISE is Ready! Login, update iseadmin password
56:45 Demo: Review Ansible-configured resources
58:28 Demo: LiveLogs Authentication for .corp SSID
58:48 Demo: Destroy it all!
1:00:29 Future ISE Automations?

Resources from the Webinar
- Thomas' GitHub Repository for this webinar: