Network management software

[blanalex]

Hello everyone! I'm new to network administration as I was before a desktop administrator. I'm looking for a solution to manage the configuration of our managed switches. We have around 125 switches around, about 95% of them being ICX switches (7150s, 7250s, and 6430s that may or may not get upgraded).

We are currently using a AutoHotKey script to launch PuTTY and send keystrokes to backup our switches. As you can guess, it's not really robust and can easily be interrupted.

I enrolled in a 30-day demo of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM), it seems to be interesting but they don't seem to support ICX switches: it doesn't discover VLANs and interfaces from inside the switches. I guess they don't have the right SNMP MIBs.

Preferably I'd prefer vendor-agnostic software: we are a government organization and we can't control which vendor we get. It's a "lowest bidder wins" formula so we may get Cisco, Juniper, Aruba or stay with Ruckus for our next contract.

Thank You 

[pmonardo]

RUCKUS SmartZone is what you need and want in order to monitor and manage your ICX switches. As with most vendors, the monitoring and management platform is not vendor agnostic but in terms of price to monitor and manage your network, SmartZone is not expensive. It will only work with 7x00 series switches.

You can configure SZ to accept switches using a zero touch approach (straight of the box) and push a configuration template. It will automatically take backups of your configuration and much more. 
You can manage your entire network using switch templates or using the built-in GUI options. 

I would suggest you reach out to your RUCKUS SE for a demo. 

As for Solarwinds it uses SNMP/SSH and there are customers who do use it to monitor ICX switches.

[mmMOLINARI · Accepted solution]

I am assuming you are not using SmartZone - besides managing RUCKUS access points, it also manages ICX switches, but it's not vendor-agnostic. Did you consider using Ansible AWX? It's open-source, vendor agnostic, and we have many ansible playbooks for ICX here: https://github.com/commscope-ruckus/RUCKUS_ICX_Ansible

The module icx_copy allows you to copy running-config and startup-config files. The module icx_vlan allows you to manage vlans.

[syamantakomer]

Hi Blanalex,

You can go for Ruckus SmartZone or Ruckus Cloud.

Ruckus Cloud will be a better option as you only want manage switches.

For more details, refer this URL https://www.commscope.com/product-type/enterprise-networking/control-management/cloud-managed/ 

You can request of a trial and see if it can fulfil your requirements.

https://www.commscope.com/cloud-trial/