Cisco – How to push configurations to multiple Cisco Switches

ciscocisco-catalystwindows 7

Assume I have around 50 Cisco IE2000 Switches connected together and I want to reconfigure some settings, the same settings for every switch.

Normally I would open a command line session via Putty and paste the commands. But as the number of switches is growing, even this method takes its time.

I am aware of Kiwi CatTools. Unfortunately it's not free so I'm wondering if there are other efficient ways to configure a large number of Cisco switches.

Best Answer

If you absolutely must do this in only Windows, I'd see if you can get a decent command line ssh program installed. Google showed me one that looks like it'll do what you need it to. With this and cmd.exe (or a unix/linux box with ssh and bash), you should be able to write a little for loop into the command line and have it do all the commands. I have a similar problem with Brocade switches, so I've arranged pre-shared ssh keys, and whenever I need to push a command out, I execute a loop in bash (on unix) looks kind of like this:

for switch in sw1 sw2 sw3
  ssh admin@$switch command > $switch.out
done

Now I actually wrote that into a script that'll read an environment variable containing a list of all my switches (which is shared with the rest of my team and updated centrally). I also do some stuff in terms of logging commands issued this way, as well as archiving output by date with a retention, but that's because we do it so much that it was worth writing.

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