What is Cisco SD-WAN?

Cisco SD-WAN is a very popular product. The reason for this is because buying private wan connections like MPLS are expensive. People want a cheaper solution. This is where solutions like SD-WAN come into play. SD-WAN is able to save us money by using a combination of internet and private wan connections to make network management easier. One confusing thing about SD-WAN is that each vendor has their own idea what SD-WAN is. Cisco's SD-WAN solution is made up of four key components. These are: vManage, vSmart, vEdge, vBond and there is also vAnalytics.

vManage is where you get to configure and manage the entirety of the Cisco SD-WAN solution. To access it you are able to use a GUI or REST API. You can do device configurations, set up network policies and also you are able to view alerts or events / outages

vSmart is the control plane of the Cisco SD-WAN solution. It advertises routes, security, and policy info from what you configured through vManage. To do this it uses a protocol called Overlay Management Protocol (OMP). I will go into more detail on this in my next post.

vBond is like the glue of Cisco SD-WAN it is a part of the orchestration plane. The primary purpose of vBond is to authenticate vSmart controllers and vEdge routers to allow connectivity between them. It also tells vEdge routers how to connect to vManage and vSmart controllers. One important thing to know about the vBond is that it needs a public IP.

vAnalytics is just an analytics service. It allows you to view application data and view your infrastructure for the entirety of SD-WAN.

Lastly is vEdge. vEdge can be a virtual or hardware router at your different sites and is responsible for the data plane. It connects to the vSmart controller by using a DTLS connection.