thousands of devices to exchange information through
their control plane protocols and settle on a certain view
of the network or wait for tens of SDN controllers to
accomplish the same task; the convergence time
improvements are massive.
Cisco currently has two SD-WAN offerings. The first one,
based on the Viptela acquisition, is called Cisco SD-
WAN; the second one, based on the Meraki acquisition,
is called Meraki SD-WAN. We already covered Cisco
Meraki at the beginning of this chapter; this section
covers Cisco SD-WAN based on the Viptela acquisition.
You’ve already seen some of the advantages that SDN
brings to WAN connectivity. Based on this new
architecture and paradigm, the Cisco SD-WAN offering
contains several products that perform different
functions:
vManage: Cisco vManage is a centralized network management
system that provides a GUI and REST API interface to the SD-WAN
fabric. You can easily manage, monitor, and configure all Cisco SD-
WAN components through this single pane of glass.
vSmart: Cisco vSmart is the brains of the centralized control plane for
the overlay SD-WAN network. It maintains a centralized routing table
and centralized routing policy that it propagates to all the network Edge
devices through permanent DTLS tunnels.
vBond: Cisco vBond is the orchestrator of the fabric. It authenticates
the vSmart controllers and the vEdge devices and coordinates
connectivity between them. The vBond orchestrator is the only
component in the SD-WAN fabric that needs public IP reachability to
ensure that all devices can connect to it.
vEdge: Cisco vEdge routers, as the name implies, are Edge devices that
are located at the perimeter of the fabric, such as in remote offices, data
centers, branches, and campuses. They represent the data plane and
bring the whole fabric together and route traffic to and from their site
across the overlay network.All the components of the Cisco SD-WAN fabric run as
virtual appliances, and the vEdges are also available as
hardware routers.