Netbox 4.4 Vlan Sites/Group deprecation

[falz]

Netbox 4.4.0 came out and lists:

• Deprecate the assignment of VLANs directly to sites #19738 - The direct assignment of VLANs to sites is now discouraged in favor of VLAN groups

The Justification listed in that case isn't so much of a justification as it is an opinion:

The recommended approach to VLAN management is to create a VLAN group scoped to the site, and assign VLANs to that group.

Someone also asked in the case how this is handled from the API perspective, but it didn't get answered:

I automation I use jinja templates with the device.site.vlans.all() function to get all vlans that are relevant for the specific device. How to replace this function in the jinja templates?

We are curious how this will shake out - since it's deprecated now, I presume removed in 4.5.0/4.6.0. When that happens will something automatically create groups and a group to site association?

Or is there an expectation that that is completed manually prior to 4.5?

In our case we only have one vlan per site (at most) but very few sites with vlans, so it's creating a vlan group to hold a single VLAN - so some busywork, but probably ok.

Just looking for clarification of these things so people know what to do well in advance of vlan to site being removed.

[MANT5149]

Also curious about this. Have many sites with one VLAN directly assigned, so I'm not following the need to create a group to hold one VLAN. If the decision is made to continue, will this process be automated during the upgrade, or do we have to undo site assignments before upgrading?

[ZPrimed]

In addition to all of the above - we have a use case where VLANs need to span multiple sites (P2P RF links between sites). Currently we just put the same number at both sites and it's "assumed" to be the same... but if we're losing the ability to assign VLANs to sites then this is no longer viable.

Representing this with VLAN Groups will be somewhat cumbersome, as it will require creation of arbitrary Site Groups or Regions to contain the sites using the same VLANs, since a single VLAN Group can't be scoped to multiple sites at the same time (AFAIK).