 So we're going to talk today about deploying Unify and if you didn't notice by the playlist we love Unify We've been really happy with their product line. We've been using them for a few years now. Their stuff just is solid It works great. It's been some of the most trouble-free Wi-Fi deployments. We've Ever done and we've messed with a lot of different Units and I we've settled on this one a while ago and I have no regrets The software works great. They keep coming up with new versions and the hardware is solid We've only ever had and I'm talking out of just tons of these we deployed a single brick go bad We've never had a Unify unit go bad And that's weird to me and I say weird because you just see a lot of failures with hardware We have not seen failures with these hardwares for the ones we've deployed I've seen a couple people talk about it and heard it rumblings about it but I have not myself experienced them and It's it's a lot of them. We've deployed in places And I've been absolutely happy also all the firmware updates have gone really well Now back to the actual deployment process Unify makes this Absolutely simple this the workflow is easy and that's we're gonna walk you through is kind of our workflow for doing this couple prerequisites Now the way we do it and this is the easy way to do it for us Because it's all in the same network is we have a self-hosted unified controller here in our office in our server stack The process is going to be a little bit different There's a joint process which I believe I've covered in one of the other videos where you have to type in the URL And you can use some of the unified tools to do that like to discover them on your network put in your URL now It's really important that you set up a URL for these your URL should be you know Maybe unified at your company calm I have had people reach out to me for help other IT companies are like we kind of set it up by IP address And I'm like that is a horrible idea They said yes We've realized that because we have a new IP address and all of our controllers aren't talking That is means you have to go in and start manually changing things Which is just a real pain in the butt if we were to change IP addresses I would simply make a DNS entry to update the URL it goes to and the unifies would not care They are not tied to an IP address. They're tied to a URL dot our domain comm therefore easy to make changes So the process for us and this is one of the reasons I like having the self-hosted controller here is even easier When you have a self-hosted controller and that controllers on the same network with DHCP that you're going to be plugging these into and We have that configured here. We're simply going to plug these in it will find them and Insert the proper URL now couple prerequisites as well having a URL that resolves internally to your unify server That's often referred to as nat reflection PFS makes that really easy to do Because it sees that you're trying to access an external URL that it realizes It has a port open for and it goes. Oh wait, that's this internal server and just redirects it there So if however you or firewall may be configured to do that, it's often referred to as nat reflection I've heard a call a couple other things. I can't remember the entire list, but basically it's so things externally resolved to the proper internal servers this is a Definite must that you need to have set up internally if you want to do what we're doing now What we do is once we have the planning phase done We've went to the client and sometimes we will do that by simply taking a unit out there I know unifies got these really cool heat maps and those are helpful But you don't always have the X-ray vision to know what's in the walls What was in the walls especially if the buildings old and been remodeled a couple times Whether or not there's some rebar in the walls when there probably shouldn't be but some buildings especially here in Detroit Are really old and there's all kinds of randomness. So sometimes when it comes to the valuation side Literally we take these out to plug them in and do a little bit of testing That's it has a little bit of work on our side, but it also gives you Extremely good insight to how these are going to perform for the client And we've just done things put these on shelves and seen how far they would reach We did a church that was built right around early 1800s and so part of the proposal was coming out there. We took the Wi-Fi Set it up in the church and we realized it was just no way to go through whatever mystery was in these really thick walls The church is amazing. It's beautiful, but it just doesn't really Offer good Wi-Fi service. So they we put it we had to put a couple of them there and same with a lot of flooring Sometimes you can get away with when you have a two-floor building when you put them on the ceiling It comes right through the floor perfectly fine any newer building. That's not a problem We've a lot of times put in single unifies in the ceiling and the upstairs offices have perfect access and no problems But if you're dealing with heavy industrial buildings complete problem, we have a client who has an industrial warehouse Multiple tiers they use a lot of reinforced steel and rebar to do those which essentially is a Faraday cage that kills off the Wi-Fi So for those we put a Wi-Fi in each floor solve the problem So the deployment itself though, this is this is what's nice once you've determined Okay, we need six Wi-Fi for this particular client whatever that number might be you've evaluated You've you've got the Wi-Fi in now you want to get them adopted This is where unify has made this process very simple now What we're gonna do is it from a process standpoint I'm not gonna show you all the post-it notes because they're not real relevant We'll put some post notes and rebox these ones for adopted notes post notes You're gonna say this one is for the front office this one's for the back office as we adopt them in our system We're gonna create a client profile and then we will adopt them in with those names And then when my on-site guys go to install these they know exactly where they go Obviously, this is really easy if there's a single Wi-Fi But most of the time if you're dealing with any larger companies is there now once these are deployed on site they're going to automatically phone home here because when we adopt them here they're gonna put that URL in and That is what makes the management so simple with unified because then they all come up on our dashboard We can control them if they are saying things like hey this Wi-Fi problem or that Wi-Fi problem We can see we can see what's connected. We can see what rate it's connected at We can see the speed it's connected at and then start the troubleshooting We're gonna go to my office in a minute and kind of cover that part of it But first thing is you we get these out of the box Get the adapters out of the box and we have some network ports behind me And I plug these into the network ports and it's gonna show up on our list because this subnet is the same Subnet that my unifies on we have plugs ready to go and a DHCP server ready to go on that On that particular network segment so these can be put in there and how this works So the the DHCP range is pretty broad so I can program You know several hundred at a time if I want Till we run out of IP space that we can disconnect them and start over again when the IP address is changing this unified Doesn't care because they all phone back to the URL and start sending the data back and because they're initiating the connection We have firewall ports open to bring the data in but they initiate the connection So unless you have aggressive firewall filtering Generally speaking when we plug these in at different offices, they just they call us and it's no problem You know in most of that we have a lot of deployments in restaurants and things like that and same thing as long as they don't have any Aggressive firewall filtering on the egress side of it so they can't get data out or you know They lock it down only certain ports were good But it the ports are documented that it uses so if you do have a client that has a very restrictive firewall Easy enough to open up the external ports so you can get outgoing traffic out for these Now even when you're setting these up when we first set them up here You don't have to worry about either VLAN information or any of that But then when you're on site you can still remotely keep sending data to these you can see sending the upgrades to these And like I said, this is kind of the overall what makes managing unify very easy And one of the reasons we really like them as a product because we just got the new unified controller I did the video on that just the other day and we then pushed out all the updates to all the new firmware on all these one awful lot of hitch and we have I Think 35 sites right now in our system that we're managing Wi-Fi for and so each one of those has a varying number Unify quite a few of them and we just hit rolling upgrade on that and you can do it now You we don't have it set to auto deploy, but that is an option You can auto deploy updates as they become available The problem with that is people make it very aggravated because it takes it down for just a couple minutes Well, it does the firmware upgrade You may not want to do that in the middle of the day because someone's gonna notice that their Wi-Fi reset And it's gonna be aggravating so we generally schedule it We know their clients hours or we let them know if they're a 24-hour business One the maintenance schedule is for that and it's they'll unify Updates as long as they have a fast connection. They go really fast I mean it's only down for a couple minutes do any firmware updates Not really a big deal. They've made the process smooth and I'm very happy to say in all the years of doing unify We have bricked zero Units doing remote upgrades We've even dealt with some lossy connections and it seems to have a good verification process Be if it didn't have all the data, it's not like it's live streaming the firmware and it gets the firmware over here Firmware is over here. It goes. Okay, I have it check some matches. Let's do the update versus If you get lost in between Not a big deal because a lot of people say what about doing updates over the Internet seems kind of risky and in some way I understand your concern Especially because we have a warehouse a lot of warehouses that man lifts were used to install these into the ceiling and they're not easily accessible So obviously if a something goes wrong, we gotta get a man lift out there to fix it So there is that you know nail biter when you're doing the updates But knock on wood then a company has been solid the updates somebody's place has been installed for a couple of years and We've pushed every update and not a problem Now if you don't know and from the other videos I'll cover real quick. These are the this is a unify a CHD This is with our higher-end high concentration models. The other nice thing about unify is mixed networks We have a mixed network that we're gonna be updating soon. It's at a stadium and that stadium has a mix of Internal Wi-Fi for some of the areas that are inside the building and in the outside building all the same Unify kind of like their name implies unifies all of this. So we have the same Wi-Fi Ranges the same units all under one customer client profile So we are in we're pushing updates to their Outdoor units and their indoor units and in a lot of special cases. We've used their indoor units I'm sorry, they're outdoor units indoors because they're in warehouses and the warehouses are not climate controlled They're industrial in nature and you want something that's not gonna have any issues and that's been kind of a solution for that Is using the industrial ones that we don't have to worry about it because these are not the weather sealed models But nonetheless these are pretty sweet and we're gonna jump in here I'm gonna go ahead and just plug this in plug it into the network that's tied to the unify controller It's gonna get an address. It's going to get into adoption mode And I'll show you kind of the adoption process and like I said you can pretend we're putting things on there But I'll walk you through the naming process on here that way I can show you like this is the adoption part That I'll show you the software part And this is really how easy it is to deploy unify once you've done all this infrastructure setup And like I said, we have a self-hosted controller. This is just really smooth So let's go ahead and plug this in drink some coffee and I'll wait a couple minutes because these have about a minute or two boot up time Now here's the really easy part of this and this is you know back to the finishing it up here the device is plugged in it's Went from linky to solid once it goes from linky to solid It's good to go and it shows up on our list now I have a switch to LTS office, but I can switch this to anyone of our clients I'm gonna blur out some of the client list here and now we switch it over to a yes I have my house managed on here and it's I called it my home Wi-Fi and you notice pending adoption is still here No matter which site I switch to That's where the pending adoption shows up. So if I move this to any other site I picked the client site that we're gonna adopt it to we just hit it and it adopts that site So I'm gonna switch it back over to our site and now it's back to our site So the ones for adoption, like I said, they follow and if I were to add a new site There's a little button you click and you add a new site to the list So pretty straightforward on that and now this one's pending adoption and we're gonna click adopt It doesn't need a firmware update or it would have said that in they all have the same default password out of the box Or if you do a master reset on they'll have a little reset button on them So it's real easy if you ever want to take over from another IT for example You can just master reset them and we've done it brought it back to our office master reset them all Adopted them all and redeployed them or we've done it on site at the client and put the URL in that all depends on How the situation is going and how we want to deal with taking them over? But then it provisions it adopts the provisions and now it's on that network And now even if we put this on another network, it will still phone home and be on ours So that's as simple as the deployment goes and then we rename it. So we're gonna click on it Go to config and give it a name the new Super cool Wi-Fi hit save Done now that has a name and we would then as we adopt these we Put them on airmen and they adopt they change color and we'd stick a post on all right This one's going here and I'm doing this from my office But normally like if we're doing a bunch of them in a row We may have them sitting in our conference room doing them and we'll sit there with a laptop as we're adopting And we know which ones are which and we just put post-it notes on there and away you go And now once these are all configured and they're up to date I can just unplug them all and I'll get an error in here because I'll realize that this unplugged and boom That's it. We take them to the site Deploy them turn them all on and we are good to go. That's it We now have deployed them all to our clients. So it's really simple. We'll cover one other little thing Move my head over the way If you go over to the managed device if I hit this Option down here in a corner that'll actually let me move it to another site So you if you accidentally do put them on the wrong site, you don't have to Forget them, which is an option. You can just say forget this device which is right here But you can actually just move it over to another client So they've kind of thought of that for those situations that that might be an issue They also have options for how you may want to configure the network on this bigger one Once you've got them adopted you if you know an IP address You're gonna be setting it to it because the client doesn't have DHCP You can force all the different settings and so the other unified rules apply and we've had a couple like that Where we got to set we know we have to set certain things and the same thing we push all those settings in there It's locked in take deploy the client and away we go the other thing you can do and a little bit more advanced is you can create some Custom WLAN groups and customize this particular one So if you have a group of which you want to do something else that is something you can do So it's so part of the same company but has its own custom profile That is not our option there But like I said, that's from those are really edge cases We don't really do that very often most of the time people want the same one And a nice thing is when we have clients who have multiple buildings and different locations even they want their Wi-Fi to be the same So we'll actually put we have a client that has out of state buildings But they want their Wi-Fi to be the same so when they take your devices from Travel from one location to another that they log in with the same and everything's universally the same So when they leave the office in Michigan and head to the office in Nashville They logs right in and unify has no problem handling that and that's what we did here We do deploy them we ship them to the locations that they needed to go to We manage them in a one single dashboard and if we change the password it changed the password for all of them at once And like I said, this is why we like the self-hosted controller system because it makes it really really easy to do Because we're doing it all in-house on our servers and we're able to then see which clients are connected We can see like right now There's four clients connected to the Wi-Fi and we start getting all the stats and I've covered this before in-depth on how the unify sees everything and how it can easily manage all the Wi-Fi in there For viewing things I covered that in my last video for you know Like the what seeing the wireless up links seeing the interference that might be caused in which people are on which one So hopefully this was helpful kind of give you an idea of how we do the deployments And why we like the unifies and wow they just they make this really easy. This is a Not a problem to do. It's easy to deploy easy to set up easy to manage once it's been deployed because when a client Calls us we're just gonna switch to the client that says I'm having a problem with my Wi-Fi We can look to see if that device they have is trying to connect to it or what the conditions are or if there's any errors Or if the system is down all these are status connected But if they go down we're gonna get a different status note on there So we're able to see oh yeah, your Wi-Fi is down, you know So we can start answering the questions right away right from one single dashboard for all this and we know everyone's got Wi-Fi now So this this has been one of the better systems I've seen to do this The interface is really nice and the deployment process. It's really as simple as I just described it in this video Which is why we keep deploying the unified systems out to clients So hopefully this was helpful if you like the content here like and subscribe get questions. They've been in the comments below. Thanks