I recently had a customer who was shipped a Cisco 4331 that somehow booted up with the Cisco Viptela SD Wan IOS (cEdge) instead of normal IOS. I suspect when they were setting it up they chose the wrong option out of the box – but either way its not a simple one click roll back to get the unit to the ‘classic’ IOS-XE that an engineer is used to for CLI config. Default Viptela IOS-XE login is admin:admin.
Here are the steps we took to get the unit downgraded for them:

  1. Download a version of IOS-XE to USB drive, and plug in to USB0 or USB1 on router
  2. Set the register to 0x0 to force rommon boot (in SDWAN mode):
router# config-transaction
router(config)# config-register 0x0
router(config)# commit
router(config)# end

3. reload
4. boot from the USB0 drive (or USB1) using the IOS-XE image you downloaded (you can type dir usb0: if you need to get the full file name, and dev if you want to see all the device names present)

rommon 1 > dir usb0:
rommon 2 > boot usb0:c1100-universalk9_ias.16.06.05.SPA.bin [replace this name with your relevant IOS filename]

5. After booting to IOS-XE, copy image to flash, set boot image to the new image, and save config. Also set the register back to the normal boot option:

router> en
router# copy usb0:c1100-universalk9_ias.16.06.05.SPA.bin flash:
router# conf t
router(config)#config-register 0x2102
router(config)#boot system bootflash:c1100-universalk9_ias.16.06.05.SPA.bin
router(config)#do wr
router(config)#do copy run start
router(config)#do copy start nvram:
router(config)#do reload

6. That should now be working – a reload will occur, booting off your correct IOS-XE image with a valid startup ready to go.

One command i did not try when it was in SD Wan mode was:

router#request platform software sdwan software reset

I think this command only resets the cEdge config for Viptela SD-WAN, not factory reset back to IOS-XE

Cisco Router – Viptela IOS-XE to Classic IOS-XE Downgrade
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