{"id":3248,"date":"2014-10-30T08:44:55","date_gmt":"2014-10-30T08:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-infoblox-blog.pantheonsite.io\/?p=3248"},"modified":"2020-05-06T10:30:16","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T17:30:16","slug":"dealing-with-massive-vlan-change-requirements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infoblox.com\/blog\/community\/dealing-with-massive-vlan-change-requirements\/","title":{"rendered":"Dealing with Massive VLAN Change Requirements"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Matt Gowarty, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Cloud and Virtualization at Infoblox<\/em><\/p>\n

For the networking staff, a majority of our day can be tied to requirements from other teams and organizations. \u00a0For example, has it ever happened in your organization where the server team decided to move data centers or migrate servers to improve performance or security? \u00a0If it has, it likely has impacted the network team as well because often the VLANs will need to be changed to support the move.<\/p>\n

During a recent customer visit, the networking team told the story of how they had to deal with that exact situation where it was requested to help move over a thousand servers over the course of the year. \u00a0When evaluating the requirement, the team found two major issues:<\/p>\n

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  1. A lack of documentation of exactly where each server was currently connected to the network, and<\/li>\n
  2. The current process required a level 3 engineer to make the change because\u00a0of the criticality and need to modify the configurations settings manually.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Like always, if the team had plenty of free time and documentation was perfect, it could have been done manually. \u00a0Raise your hand if you live in that world.<\/p>\n

    If you live in the real worlk like the rest of us, you can quickly and securely handle requirements such as these be leveraging Network Automation with NetMRI.<\/p>\n

    I just published a\u00a0Tech Tip on\u00a0<\/a>Automating Bulk VLAN Changes<\/a>\u00a0(thanks to Sif Baksh – Infoblox Professional Service Expert for technical validation)\u00a0.\u00a0 You can view the details by following the link, but here\u2019s a quick snapshot of the power of network automation.<\/p>\n