Design a New Network Infrastructure
The Design area is where you create the structure and framework of your network, including the physical topology, network settings, and device type profiles that you can apply to devices throughout your network. Use the Design workflow if you do not already have an existing infrastructure. If you have an existing infrastructure, use the Discovery feature. For more information, see About Discovery.
You can perform these tasks in the Design area:Procedure
Step 1 |
Create your network hierarchy. For more information, see Create a Site in a Network Hierarchy. |
Step 2 |
Define global network settings. For more information, see Manage Global Network Settings. |
Step 3 |
Define network profiles. |
About Network Hierarchy
You can create a network hierarchy that represents your network's geographical locations. Your network hierarchy can contain sites, which in turn contain buildings and areas. You can create site and building IDs to easily identify where to apply design settings or configurations later. By default, there is one site called Global.
The network hierarchy has a predetermined hierarchy:
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Areas or Sites do not have a physical address, such as the United States. You can think of areas as the largest element. Areas can contain buildings and subareas. For example, an area called United States can contain a subarea called California, and the subarea California can contain a subarea called San Jose.
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Buildings have a physical address and contain floors and floor plans. When you create a building, you must specify a physical address and latitude and longitude coordinates. Buildings cannot contain areas. By creating buildings, you can apply settings to a specific area.
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Floors are within buildings and consist of cubicles, walled offices, wiring closets, and so on. You can add floors only to buildings.
You can change the site hierarchy for unprovisioned devices while preserving AP locations on sitemaps. Note, however, that you cannot move an existing floor to a different building.
The following is a list of tasks that you can perform:
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Create a new network hierarchy. For more information, see Create a Site in a Network Hierarchy.
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Upload an existing network hierarchy from Cisco Prime Infrastructure. For more information, see Upload an Existing Site Hierarchy.
Guidelines for Image Files to Use in Maps
Follow these guidelines to use map image files:
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Use a graphical application that can save the map image files to any of these formats—.jpg, .gif, .png, .pdf, .dxf, and .dwg.
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Map image files can be of any size. Cisco DNA Center imports the full definition of the original images to its database, but during display, it automatically resizes them to fit the workspace.
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Obtain the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the site in feet or meters before importing. This helps you to specify these dimensions during map import.
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Avoid using floor map images with rotation metadata, because the images might not render correctly when synced to CMX or Cisco DNA Spaces. Although the floor map images might be in formats that are supported by Cisco DNA Center, the ways in which certain tools add the metadata can be rendered differently. For example, an image file with rotation metadata that is opened in three different applications might render horizontally in two applications and vertically in the other.