We spent some time earlier in the course talking about OMP,
and we've certainly mentioned it a lot.
It is the heartbeat of the data plane here in our SD-WAN environment.
In this skill, and in maybe even skills to come,
we're going to be diving deeper into OMP,
which is the Overlay Management Protocol.
Let's do a very quick review of what we covered earlier in the course,
just so we all have the same foundation,
we make sure we have the basics down before we dive even deeper.
Once again, OMP stands for Overlay Management Protocol,
and it is the routing protocol used to
propagate routes throughout the SD-WAN environment.
Yes, if you've never heard of this protocol before SD-WAN,
that is the correct answer,
believe it or not, because it is only used here in SD-WAN.
It is not only Cisco proprietary,
naturally, Cisco didn't develop it,
they acquired it along with the rest of the Viptela solution when they acquired Viptela.
But now, it is Cisco proprietary,
and at the time of this video,
it's only used in SD-WAN.
So you wouldn't have heard of it outside of the SD-WAN architecture.
Although at this point, SD-WAN has been around for long enough that
perhaps it started to wade into other conversations.
OMP was designed in very similar fashion to BGP.
It's a very BGP-like protocol.
For example, it carries information, not routes,
meaning we can carry far more than routes.
We will carry routes, absolutely,
but we're also going to carry additional pieces of information.
So OSPF and EIGRP can only carry routes,
BGP can carry routes,
it can carry a lot of other things,
and OMP is exactly like BGP in that regard.
It also connects over TCP.
So with, again, our interior gateway protocols,
if we have something like EIGRP running,
then we're going to send multicast messaging back and forth to form our neighborships.
But with a TCP protocol,
I could actually have many hops in between two devices,
and while these two devices would never become EIGRP neighbors,
they absolutely could become OMP peers
because I send out my messaging via unicast and TCP.
So this is very important in the service provider world,
which is why BGP operates this way,
but it's also important in our SD-WAN fabric.
Furthermore, very importantly,
OMP is going to use this route reflector concept,
and we'll talk a little bit more detail about this coming up.
But the idea here is that if I have a bunch of edge devices in my network,
I might have thousands of edge devices,
we might expect that they're going to form a full mesh relationship of OMP peerings,
and the reality is that we're not going to do that at all.
In fact, we're not going to form any relationships,
any peerings among our edges.
Instead, I'm going to have my vSmart,
otherwise known as the controller,
as we call it now, the SD-WAN controller,
and we're going to form relationships with all of these devices.
This means that when a new edge comes online,
it doesn't have to form all of these connections.
Instead, it just forms a connection to the controller,
and as we might imagine,
potentially a redundant controller here,
which would also form these connections.
We start to see the architecture and the concept of the route reflector start to take effect,
meaning that if I share a route with the controller,
then it's going to reflect the route down to all of the other edges.
So we reflect it down stream in this fashion.
So this is how our architecture is going to form.
Importantly, again, I'm never going to see an edge-to-edge peering inside of SD-WAN.
It will always be either edge-to-controller or controller-to-controller.
Again, we're going to talk in more detail about this coming up.
Now, we also had mentioned earlier that there are
different route types that are shared among OMP peers.
In fact, there are three of these route types.
The first route type is called an OMP route,
and we'll often see this referred to as a V-route as well.
That is the main type of route that will propagate in our environment.
However, there are two other very important route types,
the T-lock route, as well as the service route.
When it comes to sharing information about subnets,
those will be OMP routes.
As the name implies,
if we have information to share about T-locks,
that will be via a T-lock route.
Service routes are pretty interesting.
It allows us to form the concept of service chaining in the SD-WAN fabric.
That is a little bit more of a niche concept,
but we will absolutely explore that and be comfortable with what it is that does,
even though we might not necessarily see this in every single deployment of SD-WAN.
But these first two absolutely will be mission
critical to our SD-WAN fabric regardless of the size of our network.
Now, lastly, OMP is very important for sharing routing information.
We won't be able to get from one site to a subnet at another site without OMP,
and so that's usually where we spend our time focusing.
But it's also important to recognize that OMP allows us to deploy our policy.
We are going to continue to get closer and closer
to exploring the concept of policy deployment.
It's one of the biggest benefits of SD-WAN.
Yes, SD-WAN creates an overlay network,
and that greatly simplifies things,
and that's a good thing for us from a management perspective.
It gives us a lot more consistency.
It allows us to take advantage of maybe even some lower cost
WAN technologies that we can use in our SD-WAN.
All of these are great benefits.
But the other reality is that I,
as the network admin,
can more effectively deploy policy into my environment,
and that policy gets distributed via OMP.
So we're going to see more and more of how that comes together as well.
So this is the fundamental set of
concepts that we talked about earlier on in the course.
From here, it's time to go a whole lot deeper into what OMP
does for us and how we can go about configuring and tuning it.