On August 12, the Community hosted the webinar HPE Self-Driving Network - Innovating with HPE Networking CX Series, presented by Abhi Shamsundar, Anup Mehta, and Deepti Ganesh. The session explored how HPE is bringing cloud management, AI-native operations, and greater automation to the HPE Networking CX switching portfolio.
The takeaway is straightforward: HPE is working toward network operations that are easier to deploy, simpler to scale, and more proactive to troubleshoot. Here are the highlights.
Moving toward a self-driving network
The presenters described HPE’s self-driving network vision as a combination of continuous monitoring, configuration management, AI-driven insight, and automated remediation. Instead of waiting for users to report a problem, network teams can use telemetry and AIOps to identify issues earlier, understand their likely cause, and take action before service is affected.
This matters for teams managing growing campus, branch, and data center environments with limited time and resources. The goal is fewer support tickets, less reactive firefighting, and a clearer view of the user experience across the network, supported by cloud-native operations and zero-trust security principles.
HPE Networking CX switches are coming to HPE Mist
One of the biggest announcements covered in the webinar is the planned support for managing select HPE Networking CX switches via HPE Mist, alongside HPE Aruba Central giving customers a greater flexibility to choose the cloud management experience that best fits their environment and operating model.
The initial release, targeted for fall 2026, is expected to support the CX 5420, CX 6300, and CX 6400 series. The first set of capabilities discussed includes:
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Onboarding through claim codes, QR codes, activation codes, or a registration-code workflow for deployed switches
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Layer 2 configuration, including VLANs, port profiles, DHCP, and DNS
Additional CX platforms and capabilities are expected to follow in future releases.
Design once, then adapt by organization, site, or device
The session walked through a flexible configuration hierarchy in HPE Mist Wired Assurance. Global templates can establish common settings across an organization, while site-level and device-level overrides allow teams to make targeted changes without removing a site or a switch from the broader template.
For example, a team could test a new cloud NAC configuration on one lab switch, expand it to a pilot site, and then update the global template after validation. Existing VLANs, port profiles, DNS, NTP, and other inherited settings remain in place while only the selected configuration is overridden.
Zero-touch deployment with built-in safeguards
Claim and activation codes are designed to simplify staging and deployment. Administrators can prepare configurations before switches are unboxed, connect the devices at the destination, and allow the cloud platform to apply the intended configuration automatically.
A particularly useful safeguard is automatic rollback when a configuration change breaks cloud connectivity. Rather than requiring an onsite visit and console connection, the platform can revert the last change and show the configuration differences so the administrator can correct it remotely.
Better visibility into user experience
HPE Mist Wired Assurance combines event data with per-port telemetry to provide topology, client, and connectivity insights in one place. Instead of relying on multiple show commands, administrators can search by MAC address, IP address, or interface and quickly see where a client is connected and how that connection is performing.
Wired Service Level Expectations help teams look beyond whether a device is simply up or down. They can identify experience-impacting issues such as DHCP failures, authentication problems, security-policy enforcement, congestion, latency, jitter, and insufficient uplink headroom, at a site or across the organization.
Marvis Actions and the path to proactive remediation
Marvis Actions uses network telemetry to surface issues that deserve attention, including bad cables, loops, stuck ports, and traffic anomalies. The webinar also demonstrated an early self-driving workflow in which the system detected a device that had stopped sending traffic, determined that a PoE port bounce could help, performed the action, and verified that traffic resumed.
This is an important shift: the platform is not only identifying a likely cause, but also moving toward resolving well-understood problems automatically and confirming the outcome.
A simpler path for existing CX environments
For teams with existing CX deployments, Deepti demonstrated the Mist Switch Converter tool. The locally run Python tool can take one or more AOS-CX running configurations and convert elements such as VLANs, port profiles, interface settings, 802.1X, MAC authentication, TACACS, and RADIUS into a Mist-ready template.
Multiple configurations can be combined into a single template and matched to switches by role, hostname, or model. The resulting template can be downloaded for review or pushed to a Mist organization and assigned to the appropriate site. The team recommended reviewing the converted template carefully before applying it to production switches.
Additional webinar highlights
The webinar also covered the 3 newly launched CX 6300M models and power options, including support for up to 90W Class 8 PoE across all 48 ports simultaneously designed for power-intensive edge devices. CX6300M can also support more resilient 24-port designs with power-supply redundancy.
On the software side, the new In-Service Software Upgrade capabilities for CX 6300 switches was highlighted. Minor-release upgrades on standalone switches can be completed without disrupting data-plane traffic. These capabilities are especially valuable in environments such as healthcare and retail, where maintenance windows and service interruptions can be difficult to accommodate.
What this means for you
Whether you are deploying HPE Networking CX today, working with Juniper and Mist technologies, or evaluating a mixed environment, these developments bring together ideas that matter across both communities: standardized configuration, faster onboarding, safer change management, richer telemetry, and AI-assisted troubleshooting.
Airheads and Elevate are both built around practical knowledge sharing. As these capabilities become available, community discussions will be an important place to compare deployment approaches, share migration lessons, troubleshoot issues, and learn from peers who are putting the technology into production.