Cisco Catalyst 9800-CL on GCP: what a fight
I finally wrote up my notes on getting a modern Cisco Catalyst 9800-CL running on Google Cloud Platform.
The short version is that this was much more of a fight than I expected.
Cisco’s public GCP-facing material still nudges people toward Google Cloud Marketplace, but the Marketplace offerings I found were outrageously old: 16.12.1 and 16.12.2s from the 2019-2020 era, plus 17.2.1 and 17.3.5a from the 2020-2021 era.
That is a pretty bad situation if what you actually want is a modern WLC on GCP. The version I actually worked from was 17.15.04d, which Cisco’s software portal lists with a release date of 19-Dec-2025. Cisco’s public guidance still points at a path that appears stuck on software families from years ago, and it was not a good starting point for getting a current controller running.
The current downloadable image path is possible, but it turned out to involve more image surgery and boot-path archaeology than I had hoped for.
I put the actual handoff-style guide here:
That guide covers:
- where to get the
qcow2 - why Marketplace is not a great baseline right now
- what actually worked to get the controller reachable
- how I validated it was really up
- how to adopt an AP into the supported public-cloud path
One of the main conclusions is that Cisco’s built-in GCP bootstrap path seems to create real first-boot state that the appliance expects, which helps explain why simply editing /varied/iosxe_config.txt offline was not enough on a pristine raw image.
Anyway: what a fight. But at least the notes are in one place now.