Now that we know the benefits that SD-WAN can provide, it's time to talk about
Cisco
Solution, which is simply known as Cisco SD-WAN.
Cisco's SD-WAN product came after they developed their own product, which is
known as I-WAN.
And this was fairly short-lived.
Cisco realized that other vendors already had pretty good solutions out there,
and so
they just decided to go purchase another company called Viptela.
And the Cisco SD-WAN solution came from the Viptela acquisition.
And we'll see why this matters coming up here, mostly from a nomenclature or
naming perspective.
But at the same time, at this point, it's been many, many years, and it really
is now
Cisco's SD-WAN solution.
We're not going to expect to see much in the way of references to Viptela
anymore.
Now when we look at the Cisco SD-WAN solution, they divide their solution into
four planes
of operation.
If we think about the networking side, we typically think about two primary
planes with control
and data plane, sometimes the management plane.
And that's what we're going to see here, other than that Cisco is really trying
to
create its own architecture rather than trying to tie back to anything in the
existing networking.
That said, we certainly do have our data and control planes of operation.
And specifically, data plane of operation, this is going to define the traffic
paths.
And as we'll see, this is where the IPsec tunnels are formed.
We also have the control plane and the control plane defines the route
propagation.
And so far, this again feels like traditional networking, which is pretty good.
Then we have the management plane of operation.
And this is specifically going to tie back to that single interface, that
single point
of management, and this is going to be where we define how we manage things,
whether through
the graphical user interface or possibly APIs.
Now lastly, this is the unique part of SD-WAN is that Cisco creates for us the
orchestration
plane.
Orchestration is kind of an interesting one.
We say, well, normally this isn't required.
Why do we need this here compared to traditional networking?
Well, because orchestration is going to help us with onboarding.
We're talking about a software defined solution here.
We're talking about hardware that needs to more or less create its own network
on top
of itself.
But if I'm going to deploy a router out into the world, maybe a new remote site
, how does
it download all of this information?
How does it even know to join the wide area network that belongs to my
organization as
opposed to other organizations?
So that is the onboarding process.
And we're going to require operation within this plane in order to bring
everything online.
So let's go into a little bit of details here.
And we'll dive deeper and deeper as we go through the course.
We'll look at the data plane of operation, our primary device that's going to
participate
in the data plane would be our edge devices.
Now I'm using this word device.
Cisco will use the word platform.
Really these are routers.
So always keep that in mind that we're primarily building this on Cisco router
types of devices.
From a legacy perspective, I always like to provide a little bit of context
here.
This used to be known as either a V edge or a C edge.
Now Cisco has started to get rid of some of this terminology, but when we see
this in
documentation, it's going to be important for us to know what we're talking
about.
A V edge, that little V is in reference to Viptela.
That means that we're deploying Viptela hardware.
Now Cisco acquired Viptela as an SD-WAN provider and one that happened to make
router hardware.
Well as you might imagine, Cisco said, "Okay, that's great.
On day one, we absolutely need to keep producing and selling and supporting V
iptela hardware,
but we're kind of known for making routers ourselves."
And so once we get SD-WAN technology baked into iOSXE, our routing platform of
choice
for enterprise networks, then we're not going to continue to sell V edges
anymore.
And that's exactly what happened.
So what Cisco did was they created an iOSXE flavor that can handle SD-WAN and
they called
that the C edge where now the C is short for Cisco.
Well that's well and good other than again.
We don't really sell V edges anymore and so Cisco got rid of the term C edge
instead.
We're primarily going to refer to this simply as, well actually let's do it
like this, it's
known as an SD-WAN edge device.
And we're going to see that a lot of our older nomenclature or older titles
have been replaced
by something that sort of follows this format.
So what exactly is this data plane all about?
Well again, we're typically going to run these in the modern network on
catalyst 8000
routers.
Cisco calls these edge platforms, but either way the catalyst 8000s is what we
're typically
going to run on SD-WAN on, although we could run this also on integrated
services routers
and aggregation services routers and we'll talk about the details of that
coming up.
But interestingly this can be physical or it can actually be virtual.
So we could deploy cloud routers into cloud spaces and allow them to
participate by building
out those IP sec tunnels.
Very cool and we're going to leverage this virtual concept especially for
creating labs.
But keep in mind in the real world we can deploy these into cloud spaces as
well.
So both of these are going to be good use cases for virtual SD-WAN edges.
And importantly they are going to form as we mentioned the IP sec tunnels.
The IP sec tunnels operate inside of the data plane.
So when we're looking at our SD-WAN edge here as well as the IP sec tunnels
these are facets
of the data plane.
Now as we go through these we can now look at the non data planes of operation
including
the control plane.
So the control plane is going to run not as a router but this is going to be
deployed
as a virtual machine.
Meaning I might deploy this into my own data center or into a cloud space but
either way
the control device of choice is going to be a virtual machine and that device
is known
as the SD-WAN controller.
Now if you've studied SD-WAN before you probably weren't expecting me to say SD
-WAN controller
but again Cisco has rebranded things.
This used to be known as the V smart.
Where the little V is once again part of that Viptela acquisition but Cisco
left this alone
for a very long time.
It's only really recently that they started to call things by different names.
So it used to be the V smart now it's the SD-WAN controller and this is going
to be
responsible for route propagation.
Now when we talk about route propagation we're not talking about OSPF or EIGRP
we're primarily
talking about OMP here.
We're going to be using the overlay management protocol which is going to allow
us to propagate
SD-WAN control information to all of the devices.
From here we can talk about the management plane and the management plane once
again
is going to have well first of all we deploy this as a virtual machine into our
network
and this is known as the SD-WAN manager.
So far the names make sense.
Managers part of management plane of operation the controller is part of the
control plane
of operation and nothing too complex here but just wait a moment until we get
to the
orchestration plane but either way the SD-WAN manager also had a name that we
used to call
this which is V-Manage.
And again Cisco only recently made that change.
There's a whole lot of documentation and software references to be managed we
do need
to know both names in all of these cases.
So the idea here is that once again we'll log in either via graphical user
interface
or API and importantly it's a single way for us to manage the entire SD-WAN
environment.
However as you can imagine we'll want to deploy a pair of these for the sake of
redundancy.
Now lastly this is the one I was joking about.
Now we have to worry about the orchestration plane and this is going to be
known as an
SD-WAN validator.
Oh yeah where did that name come from?
Well Cisco decided to come up with it apparently and that's perfectly fine.
This used to be known as a V-Bond and the idea with calling it the V-Bond is
that it
was bonding a new device into the network via this onboarding process.
So Cisco came up with the term validator because well we need to make sure that
the
device is supposed to be on our network and the device needs to make sure it's
attaching
to the same network or the correct network and so yeah there's some validating
that happens
during this process but just keep in mind if we see SD-WAN validator this doesn
't tie
to a validation plane operation it's going to map to the orchestration plane of
operation.
So from here again the main thing we're focusing on I won't write it again it's
the fact that
we're trying to onboard our devices and this is actually the first point of
authentication
as well.
So as I keep saying we need to make sure that this device attaches to the
correct network
and we as the network don't want random devices attaching to us and becoming
part of our
wide area network security must be baked into the solution from the ground up
and fortunately
it is.
So I highly recommend coming out of this conversation that we have a good sense
of which devices
belong to which planes of operation and I would highly recommend also knowing
the old
names the V-Bond the V-Manage the V-Smart as well as the V-Edge and the C-Edge
concepts.