we're gonna uncover in a very quick
overview what sd-wan is what the
solutions are and how you can get
started learning sd-wan
the idea with software-defined stuff
like software-defined wan or
software-defined access
or software-defined networking is that
we can just define
our intent for the entire business and
let the software handle rolling it out
for us and that's exactly what the idea
with software defined when is when we
have a business
that has many different branches or
organizations spread across
a city or a state or a country or even
the world
we can allow software now to securely
and automatically handle
the configuration of our entire wan
infrastructure now here's the thing
software defined when is sometimes used
as the actual
name of a product cisco likes to brand
their viptela solution
as just cisco sd-wan but really sd-wan
is a concept
and many different vendors offer sd-wan
solutions
there is vmware dell emc's velo cloud
solution
there is hp's silver peak solution there
is
juniper's contrail and cloud
orchestrated solution
then there's cisco solutions and they
have many different solutions for sd-wan
such as meraki or the vitella sd-wan
that i've just mentioned
so what we're going to do is we're going
to stick to a couple of the sd-wan
solutions that i'm familiar with one of
the easier ways that you can get started
figuring out how sd-wan really works is
with cisco meraki and guess what
because of the devnet sandbox there's a
way that you can get hands-on
sd-wan experience right now let's check
it out if you're actually logged in to
cbt nuggets you can get
exposed to sd-wan in a few different
ways
the actual sd-wan certification exam for
cisco i can just search for it in the
search bar
e-n-s-d-w-i which is what we like to
affectionately call the in sandwich exam
i'll search for that here and we can see
there is the sd-wan solutions
certification prep right here on cbt
nuggets what we actually do in that
course
is teach you how to deploy this right
here on the screen
each one of these blocks represents a
unique
site maybe around the world maybe this
is something like
a texas site and this is something like
a california site and maybe this is
something like nevada and you get the
idea it goes on and on and on with
sd-wan solutions
you have one point of login one place
that you
log in to manage all of these sites
around the world and beyond that with
the correct sd-wan solutions
you don't even have to configure these
devices before you ship them to the site
as long as they can plug in right here
and get an internet connection
they can be set to automatically
communicate back to your one
centralized controller and that way you
just have to log into your controller
and you can go about bringing all the
configurations and security and design
infrastructure
all up to point this is called zero
touch
provisioning or ztp for short this is
one of the biggest selling points about
sd-wan solutions is that they are plug
and play as long as you've bought it and
attached it to your account
this device will connect to the internet
connect to your account and say hey i'm
here i'm ready to be configured
and you are off to the races it's a
beautiful thing
but then like i say you don't have to
ssh into each one of these devices
when it comes time to configure them you
can simply log in
to your front-end portal and start
configuring your sd-wan solutions there
now how can you get started getting
hands-on with this again
we've got the cbt nuggets content that
will teach you how to do this
but beyond that we can leverage a
special tool one of my favorite tools
and that's cisco's devnet sandbox if you
go to devnetsandbox.cisco.com
you can log in with a free account like
your github account and then from there
you can choose which sd-wan solution
that you want to work with
i'm going to choose meraki always on
real quick so we get confronted with
this large list of items to pick from
i am going to choose the devnet sandbox
and this is where we get logged in to
our actual network where we can start
looking
at all of the different configurations
that we can make with cisco meraki
over here on the left hand side you may
already be spying it
there's security in sd-wan guess what
that's because we can manipulate
our entire sd-wan topology just like
this topology here
but within meraki firewalls and this is
where i can start to specify
some global parameters for all of my
firewalls to implement if i have
dual wan uplinks i can choose to
throttle my dual lan
uplinks i can choose to track my uplink
statistics from a specific ip address
beyond that i can choose my primary up
link here
or i can enable load balancing with just
a checkbox
think about that we can load balance out
of our wan
with just a checkbox all we have to do
is just turn it on
by clicking enabled and that's how easy
it is it's fascinating but it gets so
much more fascinating check this
out if we jump down to traffic shaping
rules what if i notice
all of a sudden too many of my users are
busy watching knox's youtube channel
and i want to be like wait a minute
you're using all of our bandwidth on
youtube we need to slow that down
i can create a new traffic rule real
quick and i can set the definition to be
something like under video and music
then i can scroll down to youtube
and now with youtube selected under rule
number one i can say
we're going to explicitly choose a
bandwidth limit and we can throttle that
sucker all the way down to 500 kilobits
per second
for a specific application look this is
the fascinating thing about sd-wan
is now instead of typing all of these
commands on one firewall at a time
or for a specific cider making all of
this complex logic
now these things are basically just drop
downs or some fill in the blanks real
quick
or a check box and it deploys this
robust configuration
all for us we log to one portal to
manage our entire solution
and then with a few clicks we've
deployed our intent
to the entire business so sd-wan is an
amazing technology and this has been
introducing you to the meraki
sd-wan solution what i can't stress
enough is that when you get up into
large enterprise businesses you may look
into something like the viptela
sd-wan solution where you start doing
some crazy topology policies qos
policies
configuring hub and spoke or firewall
insertion all of this awesome stuff
that's what the viptela st wan solution
brings to the table and again
you can learn about either meraki or
viptela sd-wan
at cbt nuggets so that's been
understanding why sd-wan is so awesome
thanks for stopping by y'all i'll see
you in the next one