All right, we are going to end this skill with a challenge.
In fact, we're going to find that we end every single skill with a challenge.
I highly recommend taking the time to do every single challenge.
It's going to help us to reinforce the knowledge that we've learned.
Sometimes it will be something like an interactive quiz like this, interactive
being that we'll
explain the answer afterwards.
We might be a lab, we have to create a lab topology and perform configuration.
It could be anything.
But the idea here, generally speaking, is that we want to again reinforce what
we've
learned and make sure that we've got it all down before moving on.
Now, when we do a quiz like this, I'm going to ask the question.
I encourage you to pause the video.
I'm not going to leave a whole lot of time to answer it.
So pause the video, make sure you can answer it yourself, and then unpause the
video.
And again, we'll go through the answer.
So first up, out of three questions here, what is the tunneling mechanism used
in the Cisco SD-WAN
solution?
Tunneling is a major part of the SD-WAN solution.
We're going to have the underlay.
That would be the service provider network.
And then we're going to build an overlay on top of this.
And this overlay is going to be built with IPsec tunnels.
This is very important.
IPsec is what we're going to be using.
We're not using VXLAN, which is a layer two tunneling mechanism.
And what we'll find is we can actually use GRE.
That actually is an option, but it's not one we're going to often deploy
because
it doesn't give us security.
And that is one of our primary concerns here.
And so we're going to deploy our Cisco SD-WAN solutions using IPsec tunnels.
Question two, how is the Cisco SD-WAN solution managed by admins?
Well, if you're like me, you love, or at least enjoy somewhat, logging in via
the CLI to a network
device.
And we know that our wide area networks might have a lot of devices.
This doesn't scale.
It's a problem that exists with our modern networks.
And so we're not going to rely on this.
Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to insert a middle software
package that then
pushes configurations via APIs.
And so the idea here is we will be logging in to a software package that we now
know
is known as the SD-WAN manager, formerly known as VManage.
And furthermore, we can use graphical user interface, or we could actually
leverage APIs
in order to access the software.
There will be CLI commands that we can use to log in and troubleshoot, but that
's not going to be
our primary mechanism for managing the overall solution.
Instead, we'll deploy SD-WAN manager as a virtual machine into our environment.
And then we will use that to access the entirety of the configuration and
manageability of all of the nodes in our software defined wide area network.
All right, question number three, and it is the last one.
Which Cisco SD-WAN device helps with the onboarding process for new devices?
Well, the answer here is going to be D, the SD-WAN validator, which is part of
that orchestration
plane. This used to be known as the V-bond.
And the idea here is that as new devices come online, we've got to find the
rest of the network
way over here. And so it's going to reach out to the V-bond and the V-bond will
connect
this device to the proper network.
Now it is important, as we've said, that we know which plane of operation each
one of
these devices operates within. There's four planes and four devices, so it
matches up well.
And furthermore, I'd recommend knowing the legacy names like V-bond.
So as we go through these, the edge used to be known as the V-edge for the Vipt
ela hardware,
the C-edge running iOSXe. And this belongs in the data plane.
The SD-WAN controller used to be known as V-Smart. And as the name implies,
this is part of the
control plane. And lastly, the SD-WAN manager used to be known as V-Manage. And
that's part of the
management plane of operation. So as we get to the end of a quiz like this,
what I would recommend
is using this as a guide to let us know, are there any gaps in our knowledge
that we should go back
and shore up before moving on? So for example, we don't maybe know all four of
the planes of operation
or this made us aware that we don't quite have the legacy names memorized. We
should go back and
review that content as well as any other content that we feel like we need to
know better before
moving on to the next skill. I hope this has been informative for you and I'd
like to thank you for