Zero Touch Provisioning

The Pica8 PICOS open network operating system is based on Linux and consequently borrows technology from the Linux server realm that promotes ease of use, including zero touch provisioning (ZTP). Once a switch is physically connected to the network, ZTP enables the automation of provisioning and configuration processes, typically using a Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) server.

ZTP routines can also take advantage of open source Linux tools such as Puppet and Chef, which were originally tools to automate server configuration tasks. These tools have now been adapted by the Open Source community to provision switch configurations. So, just as racks of servers and VMs are added to a cluster using Puppet or Chef, network switches and routers can be configured in the cluster by the same tools.

This document describes how ZTP works in PICOS, how to enable or disable it, and the ZTP API.