- [Instructor] As we take a look at SD-WAN implementation
we want to specifically examine
the recommended Cisco-based solution.
At the time of this recording
that is Cisco's SD-WAN based on Viptela.
Cisco acquired the Viptela company in 2017,
which provides a cloud-based SD-WAN solution.
This is recommended to be used
in conjunction with Cisco's DNA Center,
and that will allow you to leverage automation
and virtualization capabilities.
Within Cisco SD-WAN we can break this down into four planes.
So the data plane, the control plane,
and the management plane,
which you're probably familiar with
from traditional networking models,
and the fourth plane known as the orchestration plane.
This is essentially shared with the management plane.
There are four different solutions within Cisco's SD-WAN
created to manage each of these four different planes.
The first is Cisco vManage,
which is very simply the GUI interface
for managing the Cisco SD-WAN solution.
This is where you would perform configuration,
monitoring, and provisioning.
Then there's Cisco's vBond,
which controls the orchestration plane.
It's the job of vBond to understand
how the network is constructed
and to make sure all of the interconnected components
can work together.
One of the big capabilities here
is something called zero-touch provisioning.
This means that when an SD-WAN capable router
is introduced into the network
Cisco's vBond can remotely provision the router
from anywhere without the need for
an administrator to take any action at all,
so that's super helpful for us as administrators.
Next we have Cisco's vSmart,
which resides within the control plane.
This is thought of as the brain of the SD-WAN solution.
As we create policies in vManage,
as an administrator creates those policies
the vSmart component is responsible
for the enforcement of the policies.
Those policies are also shared with other SD-WAN routers
and locations in our network.
Route information from branch locations are received
via the Overlay Management Protocol, or OMP.
vSmart can use the known policies against these routes
to control the traffic flow through the SD-WAN fabric.
And finally in the data plane
we have the actual WAN edge routers themselves,
which are responsible for establishing the network
and for forwarding traffic.
These devices can be either physical or virtual,
or we can have a combination of those.
These SD-WAN capable edge routers
are referred to as Cisco vEdge routers.
Let's take a look at a very common way
that we might see this implemented.
Here we see a sample topology
within which we have a main campus location,
a couple of branch locations,
a physical data center, and a cloud data center.
All of these are interconnected through various means.
We see MPLS, we see LTE,
and we see satellite connections
creating this network of sites.
Again, remember that SD-WAN is an overlay technology,
and that provides transport independence.
So in other words,
it doesn't matter what the physical
underlying network infrastructure is.
As we see here, SD-WAN can work with any and all of that.
At each of these locations we would have a WAN edge router,
a Cisco vEdge device,
and these routers form IPsec tunnels with each other
in order to create the SD-WAN overlay network.
This is going to make up the data plane
that we discussed a bit earlier.
Also recall that all of the control elements
we discussed earlier, Cisco's vManage, vBond, and vSmart,
secure control channels would be established
between each of these elements
and each one of the WAN edge routers,
and that would be used for provisioning
and for configuration of the devices.
As for the edge routers themselves,
these can be either a hardware or software platform.
Hardware platforms include Cisco vEdge routers
running on the Viptela operating system
and certain integrated service router
and aggregation service router models.
Virtual platforms include
the vEdge Cloud Router running Viptela OS
and cloud services router models
running IOS XE SD-WAN software.
So that's a look at Cisco's SD-WAN based on Viptela
and how we would commonly see that implemented
in an enterprise network.