We first need to discuss if we want to start using managed switches for management switches (except the aggregation ones).
On the plus side it's convenient to have the extra visibility, but it adds a lots of management overhead to our automation, while I'm not sure we have the resources for that.

In T361871#9691816, @ayounsi wrote:

We first need to discuss if we want to start using managed switches for management switches (except the aggregation ones).
On the plus side it's convenient to have the extra visibility, but it adds a lots of management overhead to our automation, while I'm not sure we have the resources for that.

Yeah. There have definitely been times it'd be useful to track a MAC address to a specific port or something, but it's a rarity. The other questions that spring to mind are:

• Are the row C-D MSW's up for renewal?
  • i.e. do we need to replace them regardless, and the option of the old Junipers is one way to address that?
• Even if they are, does it make sense to decom them because they are old - and replace with other old boxes?
• Would we need to continue paying support for the Juniper's if we redeploy as MSWs?

If we did go the Juniper route I guess we could get a very minimal, basic L2 config with all ports enabled and in a default vlan. And perhaps ZTP can reduce further the amount of effort, although our current ZTP setup is hard-coded for QFX5120, so there is effort to uplift that (which we want to do anyway in the longer term) to support multiple models.

But after ZTP we'd still have other manual bits to do right? Monitoring etc? We might also not want to poll and store all that additional data, so we'd potentially need to create an alternate setup for them. Also, while the mgmt network is relatively isolated, we couldn't fully ignore security updates/bugs, so we'd need to still review bugs for the EX4300s and upgrade when needed. We get away with not considering that for the netgear's as they've no IP on them.

Overall it's a relatively big change, and from the netops perspective the benefits seem slight. If there are compelling reasons from a cost perspective or other dc-ops benefits I wouldn't completely rule it out, but we need to justify the effort I think.

@ayounsi @cmooney thanks for all the inputs. What I am asking is to use the Juniper old switches as dummies switches(L2 config) . I need no automation or monitoring on those I will like to use those just as the existing switches . I just don't want to manually go in the 15 switches to setup the initial and basic setup that is why i was asking if it is possible to setup ZTP to work also with those switches. If it is too mush work to do, on the ZTP side I can setup manually. Please let me know if you have more questions
Thanks.

Thanks. What I don't understand is that if they go through ZTP or manual basic setup, they will by definition be managed switches (with root password, IP, etc). I don't think we can have a middle ground where we have only some config.

@ayounsi yes you are right since it will have an IP address it will be managed so I was thinking over it. Disable the mgmt interface just setup the root password on the switch and use it as a L2 switch so we don't have to deal with managing it.

Thanks