Bulk endpoint additions with BAT

- In this video, we're going to take a look at a third way of adding IP phones to our communications manager server. Just to review what we've talked about thus far, we've seen two approaches. One approach was to manually add a phone. We would go in and say, we want to add this type of phone. Here's its Mac address, here is its directory number on this line, here is it's calling search space and all those different parameters. And that was a great way of adding an individual phone. However, if we have lots of phones to add having to go in and individually insert Mac addresses that can be a bit tedious. So we saw a time-saver, and that was in the form of auto registration. We could have a range of directory numbers that would be handed out to phones that were auto registering with communications manager, much like a PC would get an IP address from a pool of IP addresses. Here, the IP phone was getting a directory number from a pool of directory numbers. However, even after we auto registered potentially lots of phones, we may still need to go back and change things about that phone, like its description. We might want to change the directory number and a few other things. So in this video, we want to take a look at how to do a very large scale import of IP phones using a feature called BAT, the Bulk Administration Tool. And the Bulk Administration Tool is going to take two inputs and it's going to create all these phones. Specifically, we're going to have a phone specific comma separated value file that we will fill out perhaps using Microsoft Excel. And I say phone specific, because this file this spreadsheet, it's going to have a column for the MAC address of the phone, it's going to have a column for the description. We're going to add a column for the directory number. And there are several other things we could add that would be unique to a single phone. However, there are lots of settings that might apply to all the phones that we're about to import. Maybe they're all in the same device pool, they all have the same calling search space, all of their directory numbers are in the same partition, all of their directory numbers forward to voicemail under specific conditions. So for all of those common things, we're going to include that in a template. And I say it's a phone type specific template and in our case, we're dealing with Cisco 8865 IP phones so we'll create a template specific for that. And then, we're going to take those two inputs, send them into communications manager, and it's going to add those two IP phones for us. And just to set the stage for where we are now, in our last video we deleted the phones that we created manually then we added the phones back using auto registration. And just to save time in this video, I've already turned off auto registration and I have deleted those two phones. So right now, communications manager does not know about either of these phones but we're going to add them using BAT, the Bulk Administration Tool. And with the Bulk Administration Tool, we can say we want to use dummy MAC addresses instead of the actual MAC addresses to create placeholders for these phones. That might be appropriate if we don't have possession of the phones yet. However, in my case, I want to go ahead and give correct MAC address information at the beginning. So to do that, we're back on this switch HQ-SW2 to which we have connected those two Cisco 8865 IP phones. And I'm going to do a show CDP neighbors command and we can see the MAC addresses. Now connected to Fas Ethernet 1/0/2, this is HQ phone one. So I'm going to copy this that we will use in just a moment, but let's go over to our communications manager server and, or first, let me just show you that the phones are not currently installed. They have been deleted. If I do a find, we have no phones. Let's go under Bulk Administration. And I mentioned we could use Microsoft Excel. Well, there is an Excel template that we can download. I'm going to go under Upload/Download files. And we see that one of the files we have in fact, this was the only file we have by default is BAT.xlt. So I'm going to check this box and I'm going to download that file. We can then open it up inside of Microsoft Excel and we see the download progress down here. It looks good. I'll say I want to open the file in Microsoft Excel. And this file contains macros and a macros could do bad things to your system. It's a bit of a security risk. So usually Excel will not enable the running of those macros by default. I need to say I want to enable editing. And it's also going to ask me about those macros and I'll say, yes, enable the content. And you might notice that it says my copy of Excel is not active. What's going on there? Well, I typically use Mac OS and I do have a license for Microsoft Office on Mac OS but I don't use Windows much, if at all. So what I did to run the Microsoft Windows version of Microsoft Excel, inside of a VM, specifically, I'm running VMware fusion on my Mac, I installed a trial version of Microsoft Windows 10 and on that, I installed a trial version of Microsoft Excel. It's going to expire in just a few days but I only need it briefly to set this up. So that's the reason it says activate and I don't want to activate that and associate it with the license I have because I'm not going to be using it very much on Windows. So now that I've got the macros enabled because this definitely does not work well with the Mac OS version of Excel, there's a lot of difficulty in getting those macros to run. So I wanted to use the Windows version of Microsoft Excel and what I'm going to do, since the macros aren't abled I'm going to say create the file format because right now for phones, Oh, by the way, notice there are lots of other things we can add using the Bulk Administration Tool. I could add users, I could update users, but I'm just going to say phones. And in addition to the MAC address in the description I also want to specify a directory number. So let's say create file format. And there are different fields that we could add. I'm just going to be adding a directory number. That's under the line fields area. I'm going to say, I would like to add a directory number. I'll move that over to the selected line fields. I'll say create and I'll override the existing comma separated value format. And now we've got three columns, one for the Mac address one for the description and one for the directory number. Well for HQ phone one, I've already copied the MAC address for my terminal. So I'm going to paste that in and I'm going to say the description is HQ phone one and I'll make this just a bit larger so we can see it. I'm going to say the directory number is 2001. Let's go get that other MAC address. This is HQ phone two. I will copy and we'll paste. That is HQ phone two with a directory number of 2002. Well, I'm done now, I only have two phones but you could see I could add literally hundreds of phones all at once by filling out this Microsoft Excel template. Now I'm going to export this to a BAT format and it's going to go into this folder on my hard drive. I'll say, OK. That's now been exported. That's one of my two inputs that I need to give BAT. Remember I need to give it that phone specific comma separated value file that we just created. Now we need to set up that phone type specific template. So let's go over to our communications manager. I'll just stay in my Microsoft Windows environment and under Bulk Administration, I'll say that I want to create a phone template. So I go under a Bulk Administration, phones, phone template. Do I have any by default? No, I don't. Let's add one. And this is a phone type specific template. So I'm going to select my phone type. It is a Cisco 8865. I'll say next. I'll give this template a name of DEMO-TEMPLATE. And for the description, I'll say BAT-DEMO-TEMPLATE. For the Device Pool, these are going to be at the HQ site. I'll assign the HQ Device Pool, for the phone button template. I'll select standard 8865 SIP. For the Soft key Template, I'll just say standard user and for the Calling Search Space, we'll say HQ. Let's scroll down just a bit further. And for the Device Security Profile, that's a required field, I'm going to say Cisco 8865 standard SIP non-secure profile. Remember this encrypted profile for the 8865, that's one that we created earlier when we were talking about digital certificates. I'm just going to use the non-secure profile though. And for the SIP profile, I'll say it is the standard SIP profile. I'm going to save this at the phone level. We'll scroll down just a bit here, to show you we have lots of things we could change. Let's save that and then let's go into the directory number. You might wonder, "Why are we setting up a directory number in a template? Aren't the directory numbers all going to be different?" They are, but they might all have very similar settings. So I'm going to say, add a new directory number. And it's not asking me for that number. That number is contained in that comma separated value file that we just created. I'm going to say that the line template name is DEMO-LINE-TEMPLATE. We're going to be in the internal partition and let's go down to our call forward options and I'll say for call forward busy, both internal and external, I want to go to voicemail. And for no answer, I want to go to voicemail. And just as we discussed earlier when we were manually setting up these phones, the Calling Search Space Activation Policy, personal preference. I like to go with configured Calling Search Space and I'm going to configure the Calling Search Space for all of these options to be HQ. I'll set the No Answer Ring Duration to 10 seconds. Let's set the External Phone Number Mask which will apply to both of these phones because they're all at the same site and that's going to be +1859222XXXX. And the directory number that we had set up in that comma separated value file that four digit directory number those digits are going to flow through those X's. So each of those four digit numbers are going to be pre-pended with a +1859222. The plus says that this number is in EDA.164 format, the one is the country code for North America and 859, that's my area code and we'll say that 222 is my local office prefix. And let's change one other thing while we're here. Let's set the busy trigger to 1. And we'll save this. So at this point, we've created both pieces to the puzzle. We have our phone specific comma separated value file and we have our phone type specific phone template. Let's just make sure that this gets saved at the phone level as well. Let me back up the phone level in our template. And I'll say save again. Before we say to communications manager, "Okay, go ahead and merge these two files and import them into your database," let's do sort of a sanity check. Let's validate that haven't made any mistakes and the validation is available under Bulk Administration, phones and we can say validate phones. So this is not going to do anything to our communications manager database. It's just going to make sure that our two inputs are compatible with one another. And we have the option of validating specific phone details or all phone details. Well, we didn't configure all phone details, we're just going to use specific details. And the file name is going to be the file name of that comma separated value file. Oh, and we've not uploaded it yet. Let's go back and do that really quick. Under Bulk Administration, I'm going to say Upload/Download files and I'm going to say add new 'cause we need to upload that file that we exported. Let's choose the file. That's it. And the target is going to be phones. And we're going to insert specific details for that phone. I'll say save. Now that file is going to be available when I do my validation. So, back to the validation. Bulk Administration, phones, validate phones. File name is, here's our text file which is in comma separated value format. The phone template name that we just created is DEMO-TEMPLATE. And we're going to say submit and it's not going to give us the results on this screen. We're only doing two phones, so it's almost instant. But if we have lots and lots of phones like hundreds or maybe even thousands of phones that we're checking here it can take a bit. So instead of just showing us the results on screen it schedules a job and then we can go check the status of the job inside of the job scheduler. Available under Bulk Administration, Job Scheduler. Here is that job. Let's click on the job ID to see if we were successful. Great news. It says, "The job results status is success." If it were not successful, BAT is really great about giving us some feedback as to what went wrong. We could go in and take a look at the log file. And here it tells us, "Validate for two phones." That passed. But if there were an error we would get some insight as to what went wrong. Let's close out that tab. And now that everything checks out, let's do it for real. Let's go into Bulk Administration, phones, insert phones. We'll give those same two inputs. I'll say that my file name, is this file name that we just uploaded. My template is the demo template and I'm not going to create dummy MAC addresses because I gave the actual MAC addresses and we're doing specific details, not all details. And I'm going to say I want to run this immediately, not schedule it later. The reason we might want to schedule it later is if we were installing several hundred phones it could put a processor impact on our communications manager, impacting performance on our users. So in a large import of phones, you might want to do it during off hours. But we're going to run it immediately and say, submit. And just like the validation, this creates a job available under the job scheduler. Let's go under Bulk Administration, Job Scheduler. And here is that job. Let's go into it. Great news. It says, success. It's claiming that we have successfully created and imported these two IP phones. Let's see if that's true. Let's go under device and phone and it may not be finished yet. Okay. The phones are there, not all the phones are registered yet when it's still unregistered. If we waited a few minutes though, that phone would complete the registration process. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pause the video now, I'm going to wait a couple of minutes and we'll come back and see if this phone has then registered. Well, I waited about two to three minutes and I came back and did a find and now both phones have been registered. So to sum up, we have seen three ways in this lesson that we can add Cisco IP phones. Number one, we could manually add them one at a time. Number two, we could have them boot up and automatically register with some default settings that we may want to go back and change, that's auto registration, or we could use, as we've done here, BAT, the Bulk Administration Tool which lets us create a spreadsheet with information specific to each phone, its MAC address, its description, maybe it's directory number, lots of other parameters that we could add as you saw. We're going to take that comma separate value file and we're going to merge it with a phone type specific template which might have settings such as device pool, calling search space, phone button templates, soft key template. Even the directory number could have settings such as how to call, forward to voicemail. And BAT, it might be the best option if we're doing a large scale installation.