Journey to Self-Driving in HPE Switching

See how HPE Networking switches and HPE Mist come together to simplify deployment, improve visibility, and accelerate troubleshooting. This session includes a demo of switch onboarding using CX switches, including cloud-native management, Wired SLEs, Marvis Actions, and AI-native assurance. Gain deep insights into your network and how you can improve user and device experiences while adopting a self-driving approach to wired networking. Deepti Ganesh of HPE’s Wired Assurance team presented the session at Networking Field Day 41.

Ganesh organized wired assurance around day zero design, where templates scale across thousands of sites; day one deployment; and day two operations, where Mist does most of its work. With CX switches now managed in Mist alongside EX and QFX, greenfield onboarding works the same way for all of them: scan the QR claim code, which CX switches have shipped with since June, through the mobile app or add it on the dashboard, assign the switch to a site, and the staged template is pushed with zero touch. Brownfield CLI-managed switches can be adopted with a single org-wide registration code that can be scripted and rotated. A checkbox decides whether Mist manages configuration and becomes the source of truth, or only monitors. Delegates pressed on running both Mist and Central, and HPE said both the EX and CX lines will continue, with on-prem management available through Central.

The self-driving story starts with per-minute stats and asynchronous events feeding Service Level Expectations. Marvis Minis acts as a digital twin that tests DHCP, DNS, RADIUS, ARP, and defined applications every hour or on demand, which helps validate a network after an overnight cutover. Marvis Actions now self-drives four wired remediations, all off by default: disabling ports with rogue DHCP servers, adding missing VLANs, bouncing stuck ports up to three times, and shutting down looped ports. Ganesh said the stuck-port action alone auto-remediated 834 tickets. In another example, the Marvis conversational interface traced a flapping MAC address to a VRRP split-brain behind an upstream SD-WAN device. Premium Analytics adds a sustainability dashboard showing energy use by org, site, and device. Together, these features show how HPE is moving from detecting problems to fixing them, with operators deciding how much control to give up.